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LEAVES IN 
THE WIND 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



PEBBLES ON THE SHORE 

With go Illustrations 

BY C. E. BROCK 

Net $2.00 



Also published in 

THE wayfarer's LIBRARY 

at 75 cents net 



E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY 



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Copyright, 1919. 
by e. p. button & company 

All Rights Reserved 



Printed in the United States of America 



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529 226 



3 





TO MY CHILDREN 




AUTHOR'S NOTE 

The welcome given to "Pebbles on the Shore" is 
the excuse for this volume, collected for the most 
part from the same source, the columns of The Star 
and other papers, in which the articles appeared 
from week to week. Some of them have been ex- 
tended and a few are now published for the first 
time. The leaves are slight, and if they have any 
collective value it is as symptoms of the wind that 
blows them. They were written during the third 
and fourth years of the War, and in some measure 
reflect, incidentally rather than intentionally, the 
emotional experiences of the most disquieting period 
of the struggle. 




CONTENTS 

PAGE 

A Fellow Traveller i 

On a Famous Sermon 6 

On Pockets and Things 12 

On a Country Platform 20 

On a Distant View of a Pig 25 

In Defence of Ignorance 3' 

On a Shiny Night 37 

On Giving Up Tobacco 42 

The Great God Gun 49 

On a Legend of the War 58 

On Talk and Talkers 64 

On a Vision of Eden 7° 

On a Comic Genius 75 

On a Vanished Garden 80 

All About a Dog 9^ 

ix 



X CONTENTS 

PAGE 

On the American Soldier 97 

'Appy 'Einrich 103 

On Fear 108 

On Being Called Thompson 113 

On Thinking FOR One's Self 118 

On Sawing Wood 123 

Variations on an Old Theme . . . . 128 

On Clothes 147 

The Duel That Failed 153 

On Early Rising 158 

On Being Known 163 

On a Map of the Oberland 168 

On a Talk in a Bus 181 

On Virtues That Don't Count . . . . 186 

On Hate and the Soldier 192 

On Taking the Call 199 

A Dithyramb on a Dog 204 

On Happy Faces in the Strand .... 209 

On Word-Magic 223 

Odin Grown Old 229 

On a Smile in a Shaving Glass .... 235 

On the Rule of the Road 241 

On the Indifference of Nature . . . 250 

If Jeremy Came Back 257 

On Sleep and Thought 264 

On Mowing 269 




LIST OF FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

Frontispiece 

Meeting of the S. P. R. A. W 17 - 

"The art of diplomacy ..." AS 

Whose tassels the bold militiamen . . . would 
gaily pluck as they passed 89 

This generation has companioned Death too 
closely to see him again quite as the hooded 
terror of old 130 ^ 

Wherever he turned he was baulked 175 

"A real smile ..." 221 l>^ 



LEAVES IN THE WIND 




A FELLOW TRAVELLER 

I DO not know which of us got into the carriage first. 
Indeed I did not know he was in the carriage at all 
for some time. It was the last train from London 
to a Midland town — a stopping train, an infinitely 
leisurely train, one of those trains which give you an 
understanding of eternity. It was tolerably full when 
it started, but as we stopped at the suburban stations 
the travellers alighted in ones and twos, and by the 
time we had left the outer ring of London behind I 
was alone — or, rather, I thought I was alone. 

There is a pleasant sense of freedom about being 
alone in a carriage that is jolting noisily through the 
night. It is liberty and unrestraint in a very agree- 
able form. You can do anything you like. You can 
talk to yourself as loud as you please and no one will 
hear you. You can have that argument out with Jones 
and roll him triumphantly in the dust without fear of 
a counterstroke. You can stand on your head and no 
one will see you. You can sing, or dance a two-step, 



2 A FELLOW TRAVELLER 

or practise a golf stroke, or play marbles on the floor 
without let or hindrance. You can open the window 
or shut it without provoking a protest. You can open 
both windows or shut both. Indeed, you can go on 
opening them and shutting them as a sort of festival of 
freedom. You can have any corner you choose and try 
all of them in turn. You can lie at full length on the 
cushions and enjoy the luxury of breaking the regu- 
lations and possibly the heart of D.O.R.A. herself. 
Only D.O.R.A. will not know that her heart is broken. 
You have escaped even D.O.R.A. 

On this night I did not do any of these things. 
They did not happen to occur to me. What I did 
was much more ordinary. When the last of my fellow- 
passengers had gone I put down my paper, stretched 
my arms and my legs, stood up and looked out of the 
window on the calm summer night through which I 
was journeying, noting the pale reminiscence of day 
that still lingered in the northern sky ; crossed the car- 
riage and looked out of the other window; lit a cig- 
arette, sat down, and began to read again. It was then 
that I became aware of my fellow traveller. He came 
and sat on my nose. . . . He was one of those wingy, 
nippy. Intrepid insects that we call, vaguely, mosquitoes. 
I flicked him off my nose, and he made a tour of the 
compartment, investigated its three dimensions, visited 
each window, fluttered round the light, decided that 
there was nothing so interesting as that large animal 
in the corner, came and had a look at my neck. 

I flicked him off again. He skipped away, took 
another jaunt round the compartment, returned, and 



A FELLOW TRAVELLER 3 

seated himself impudently on the back of my hand. It 
is enough, I said; magnanimity has its limits. Twice 
you have been warned that I am someone in particular, 
that my august person resents the tickling imperti- 
nences of strangers. I assume the black cap. I con- 
demn you to death. Justice demands it, and the court 
awards it. The counts against you are many. You 
are a vagrant; you are a public nuisance; you are 
travelling without a ticket ; you have no meat coupon. 
For these and many other misdemeanours you are about 
to die. I struck a swift, lethal blow with my right 
hand. He dodged the attack with an insolent ease that 
humiliated me. My personal vanity was aroused. I 
lunged at him with my hand, with my paper; I jumped 
on the seat and pursued him round the lamp ; I adopted 
tactics of feline cunning, waiting till he had alighted, 
approaching with a horrible stealthiness, striking with 
a sudden and terrible swiftness. 

It was all in vain. He played with me, openly and 
ostentatiously, like a skilful matador finessing round 
an infuriated bull. It was obvious that he was en- 
joying himself, that it was for this that he had dis- 
turbed my repose. He wanted a little sport, and what 
sport like being chased by this huge, lumbering wind- 
mill of a creature, who tasted so good and seemed so 
helpless and so stupid ? I began to enter into the spirit 
of the fellow. He was no longer a mere insect. He 
was developing into a personality, an intelligence that 
challenged the possession of this compartment with me 
on equal terms. I felt my heart warming towards 
him and the sense of superiority fading. How could I 



4 A FELLOW TRAVELLER 

feel superior to a creature who was so manifestly my 
master in the only competition in which we had ever 
engaged? Why not be magnanimous again? Mag- 
nanimity and mercy were the noblest attributes of man. 
In the exercise of these high qualities I could recover 
my prestige. At present I was a ridiculous figure, a 
thing for laughter and derision. By being merciful I 
could reassert the moral dignity of man and go back 
to my corner with honour. I withdraw the sentence 
of death, I said, returning to my seat. I cannot kill 
you, but I can reprieve you, I do it. 

I took up my paper and he came and sat on it. 
Foolish fellow, I said, you have delivered yourself into 
my hands. I have but to give this respectable weekly 
organ of opinion a smack on both covers and you are 
a corpse, neatly sandwiched between an article on 
"Peace Traps" and another on "The Modesty of Mr. 
Hughes." But I shall not do it. I have reprieved you, 
and I will satisfy you that when this large animal says 
a thing he means it. Moreover, I no longer desire to 
kill you. Through knowing you better I have come 
to feel — shall I say? — a sort of affection for you. I 
fancy that St. Francis would have called you "little 
brother." I cannot go so far as that in Christian 
charity and civility. But I recognise a more distant 
relationship. Fortune has made us fellow-travellers on 
this summer night. I have interested you and you 
have entertained me. The obligation is mutual and 
it is founded on the fundamental fact that we are fel- 
low mortals. The miracle of life is ours in common 
and its mystery too. I suppose you don't know any- 



A FELLOW TRAVELLER 5 

thing about your journey. I'm not sure that I know 
much about mine. We are really, when you come to 
think of it, a good deal alike — ^just apparitions that 
are and then are not, coming out of the night into the 
lighted carriage, fluttering about the lamp for a while 
and going out into the night again. Perhaps. . . . 

"Going on to-night, sir?" said a voice at the win- 
dow. It was a friendly porter giving me a hint that 
this was my station. I thanked him and said I must 
have been dozing. And seizing my hat and stick I 
went out into the cool summer night. As I closed the 
door of the compartment I saw my fellow traveller 
fluttering round the lamp. . . . 





ON A FAMOUS SERMON 



I SEE that Queen Alexandra has made a further dis- 
tribution among charities of the profits from the sale 
of the late Canon Fleming's sermon, "On Recognition 
in Eternity." The sermon was preached on the occa- 
sion of the death of the Duke of Clarence, and judging 
from its popularity I have no doubt it is a good ser- 
mon. But I am tempted to write on the subject by a 
mischievous thought suggested by the authorship of 
this famous sermon. There is no idea which makes 
so universal an appeal to the deepest instincts of hu- 
manity as the idea that when we awake from the dream 
of life we shall pass into the companionship of those 
who have shared and lightened our pilgrimage here. 
The intellect may dismiss the idea as unscientific, but, 
as Newman says, the finite can tell us nothing about 

6 



ON A FAMOUS SERMON 7 

the infinite Creator, and the Quaker poet's serene as- 
surance — 

Yet love will hope and faith will trust 
(Since He Who knows our needs is just) 
That somehow, sonaewhere, meet we must — 

defies all the bufifetings of reason. 

Even Shelley, for all his aggressive Atheism, could 
not, as Francis Thompson points out, escape the in- 
stinct of personal immortality. In his glorious elegy 
on Keats he implicitly assumes the personal immortal- 
ity vi^hich the poem explicitly denies, as when, to greet 
the dead youth, 

The inheritors of unfulfilled renown 

Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought 

Far in the unapparent. 

And it is on the same note that the poem reaches its 
sublime and prophetic close: — 

I am borne darkly, fearfully afar; 

Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of heaven, 

The soul of Adonais like a star 

Beacons from the abode where the eternal are. 

The ink of that immortal strain was hardly dry upon 
the page when the vision was fulfilled, for only a few 
months elapsed between the death of Keats and the 
drowning of Shelley, and in the interval the great 
monody had been written. 

I refuse, for the sake of the feelings of Mr. J. 



8 ON A FAMOUS SERMON 

M. Robertson and Mr. Foote and the other stern old 
dogmatists of Rationalism, to deny myself the pleasure 
of imagining the meeting of Shelley and Keats in the 
Elysian Fields. If Shelley, "borne darkly, fearfully 
afar" beyond the confines of reason, could feel that 
grand assurance why should I, who dislike the dog- 
matists of Rationalism as much as the dogmatists of 
Orthodoxy, deny myself that beautiful solace? I like 
to think of those passionate spirits in eternal comrade- 
ship, pausing in their eager talk to salute deep-browed 
Homer as, perchance, he passes in grave discourse with 
the "mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies." I like to 
think of Dante meeting Beatrice by some crystal stream, 
of Lincoln wandering side by side with Lee, of poor 
Mary Lamb reunited to the mother she loved and 
whom she slew in one of her fits of insanity, and of an 
innumerable host of humbler recognitions no less 
sweet. 

But Canon Fleming's name reminds me that all 
the recognitions will not be agreeable. I cannot im- 
agine that eminent Court preacher showing any eager- 
ness to recognise or be recognised by that other emi- 
nent preacher, Dr. Talmage. For it was Talmage's 
sermon on the wickedness of great cities that Fleming 
so unblushingly preached and published as his own, 
simply altering the names of American cities to those 
of European cities. Some cruel editor printed the two 
sermons side by side, I think in the old St. James's 
Gazette, and the poor Canon's excuse only made mat- 
ters rather worse. The incident did not prevent him 
securing preferment, and his sermon on "Recognition 



ON A FAMOUS SERMON 9 

in Eternity" still goes on selling. But he will not be 
comfortable when he sees Talmage coming his way 
across the Elysian Fields. I do not think he will offer 
him the very unconvincing explanation he offered to 
the British public. He will make a frank confession 
and Talmage will no doubt give him absolution. There 
will be many such awkward meetings. With what 
emotions of shame, for example, will Charles I. see 
Strafford approaching. "Not a hair of your head shall 
be touched by Parliament" was his promise to that in- 
strument of his despotic rule, but when Parliament de- 
manded the head itself he endorsed the verdict that 
sent Strafford to the scaffold. And I can imagine there 
will be a little coldness between Cromwell and Charles 
when they pass, though in the larger understanding of 
that world Charles, I fancy, will see that he was quite 
impossible, and that he left the grim old Puritan no 
other way. 

It is this thought of the larger understanding that 
will come when we have put off the coarse vesture of 
things that makes this speculation reasonable. That 
admirable woman, Mrs. Berry, in "Richard Feverel," 
had the recognitions of eternity in her mind when she 
declared that widows ought not to remarry. "And to 
think," she said, "o' two (husbands) claimin' o' me 
then, it makes me hot all over." Mrs. Berry's mis- 
take was in thinking of Elysium in the terms of earth. 
It is precisely because we shall have escaped from the 
encumbering flesh and all the bewilderments of this 
clumsy world that we cannot merely tolerate the idea, 



lo ON A FAMOUS SERMON 

but can find in it a promised explanation of the inex- 
plicable. 

It is the same mistake that I find in Mr. Belloc, 
who, I see from yesterday's paper, has been denounc- 
ing the "tomfoolery" of spiritualism, and describing 
the miracles of Lourdes as "a. special providential act 
designed to convert, change, upset, and disintegrate the 
materialism of the nineteenth century." I want to see 
the materialism of the nineteenth century converted, 
changed, upset and disintegrated, as much as Mr. Bel- 
loc does, but I have as little regard for the instrument 
he trusts in as for the "tomfoolery" of spiritualism. 
And when he goes on to denounce a Miss Posthle- 
thwaite, a Catholic spiritualist, for having declared 
that in the next world she found people of all religions 
and did not find that Mohammedans suffered more 
than others I feel that he is as materialistic as Mrs. 
Berry. He sees heaven in the terms of the trouble- 
some little sectarianisms of the earth, with an as- 
cendency party in possession, and no non-alcoholic Puri- 
tans, Jews, or Mohammedans visible to his august eye. 
They will all be in another place, and very uncom- 
fortable indeed. He really has not advanced beyond 
that infantile partisanship satirised, I think, by Swift: — 

We are God's chosen few. 

All others will be damned. 

There is no place in heaven for you; 

We can't have heaven crammed. 

No, no, Mr. Belloc. The judgments of eternity will 
not be so vulgar as this, nor the companionship so 



ON A FAMOUS SERMON ii 

painfully exclusive. You will not walk the infinite 
meadows of heaven alone with the sect you adorned 
on earth. You will find all sorts of people there re- 
gardless of the quaint little creeds they professed in 
the elementary school of life. I am sure you will find 
Mrs. Berry there, for that simple woman had the root 
of the true gospel in her. "I think it's al'ays the plan 
in a dielemma," she said "to pray God and walk for- 
ward." I think it is possible that in the larger atmos- 
phere you will discover that she was a wiser pupil in 
the elementary school than you were. 





ON POCKETS AND THINGS 



I SUPPOSE most men felt, as I felt, the reasonable- 
ness of Mr. Justice Bray's remarks the other day on 
the preference of women for bags instead of pockets. 
A case was before him in which a woman had gone 
into a shop, had put down her satchel containing her 
money and valuables, turned to pick it up a little 
later, found it had been stolen, and thereupon brought 
an action against the owners of the shop for the re- 
covery of her losses. The jury were unsympathetic, 
found that in the circumstances the woman was re- 
sponsible, and gave a verdict against her. 

12 



ON POCKETS AND THINGS 13 

Of course the jury were men, all of them prejudiced 
on this subject of pockets. At a guess I should say 
that there were not fewer than 150 pockets in that 
jury-box, and not one satchel. You, madam, may re- 
tort that this is only another instance of the scandal 
of this man-ridden world. Why were there no women 
in that jury-box? Why are all the decisions of the 
courts, from the High Court to the coroner's court, left 
to the judgment of men? Madam, I share your in- 
dignation. I would "comb-out" the jury-box. I would 
send half the jurymen, if not into the trenches, at 
least to hoe turnips, and fill their places with a row 
of women. Women are just as capable as men of 
forming an opinion about facts, they have at least as 
much time to spare, and their point of view is as es- 
sential to justice. What can there be more ridiculous, 
for example, than a jury of men sitting for a whole 
day to decide the question of the cut of a gown with- 
out a single woman's expert opinion to guide them, or 
more unjust than to leave an issue between a man and 
a woman entirely in the hands of men? Yes, cer- 
tainly, madam, I am with you on the general question. 

But when we come to the subject of pockets, I am 
bound to confess that I am with the jury. If I had 
been on that jury I should have voted with fervour 
for making the woman responsible for her own loss. 
If it were possible for women to put their satchels 
down on counters, or the seats of buses, or any odd 
place they thought of, and then to make some innocent 
person responsible because they were stolen, there 
would be no security for anybody. It would be a 



14 ON POCKETS AND THINGS 

travesty of justice — a premium upon recklessness and 
even fraud. Moreover, people who won't wear pockets 
deserve to be punished. They ask for trouble and 
ought not to complain when they get it. 

I have never been able to fathom the obduracy of 
women in this matter of pockets. It is not the only 
reflection upon their common-sense which is implicit 
in their dress. If we were to pass judgment on the 
relative intelligence of the sexes by their codes of cos- 
tume, sanity would pronounce overwhelmingly in fa- 
vour of men. Imagine a man who buttoned his coat 
and waistcoat <lown the back, so that he was dependent 
on someone else to help him to help to dress him in 
the morning and unfasten him at night, or who relied 
on such abominations as hooks-and-eyes scattered over 
unattainable places, in order to keep his garments in 
position. You cannot imagine such a man. Yet 
women submit to these incredible tyrannies of fashion 
without a murmur, and talk about them as though it 
was the hand of fate upon them. I have a good deal 
of sympathy with the view of a friend of mine who 
says that no woman ought to have the vote until she 
has won the enfranchisement of her own buttons. 

Or take high-heeled boots. Is there any sight more 
ludicrous than the spectacle of a woman stumbling 
along on a pair of high heels, flung out of the per- 
pendicular and painfully struggling to preserve her 
equilibrium, condemned to take finnicking little steps 
lest she should topple over, all the grace and freedom 
of movement lost in an ugly acrobatic feat? And 
when the feet turn in, and the high heels turn over 



ON POCKETS AND THINGS 15 

— heavens! I confess I never see high heels without 
looking for a mindless face, and I rarely look in vain. 
But the puzzle about the pockets is that quite sen- 
sible vv^omen go about in a pocketless condition. I 
turned to Mrs. Alpha just now^ — she was sitting by the 
fire knitting — and asked how many pockets she had 
when she was fully dressed. "None," she said. 
"Pockets haven't been worn for years and years, but 
now they are coming in — in an ornamental way." "In 
an ornamental way," said I. "Won't they carry any- 
thing?" "Well, you can trust a handkerchief to 
them." "Not a purse?" "Good gracious, no. It 
would simply ask to be stolen, and if it wasn't stolen 
in five minutes it would fall out in ten." The case was 
stranger than I had thought. Not to have pockets was 
bad enough; but to have sham pockets! Think of it! 
We have been at war for three and a half years, and 
women are now beginning to wear pockets "in an orna- 
mental way," not for use but as a pretty fal-lal, much 
as they might put on another row of useless buttons 
to button nothing. And what is the result? Mrs. 
Alpha (I have full permission to mention her in order 
to give actuality to this moral discourse,) spends hours 
looking for her glasses, for her keys, for the letter that 
came this morning, for her purse, for her bag, for all 
that is hers. And we, the devoted members of her fam- 
ily, spend hours in looking for them too, exploring 
dark corners, probing the interstices of sofas and chairs, 
rummaging the dishevelled drawers anew, discovering 
the thing that disappeared so mysteriously last week or 
last month and that we no longer want, but rarely the 



i6 ON POCKETS AND THINGS 

article that is the very hub of the immediate wheel of 
things. 

Now, I am different, I am pockets all over. I am 
simply agape with pockets. I am like a pillar-box 
walking about, waiting for the postman to come and 
collect things. All told, I carry sixteen pockets — none 
of them ornamental, every one as practical as a time- 
table — pockets for letters, for watch, for keys, for 
handkerchiefs, for tickets, for spectacles (two pairs, 
long and short distance), for loose money, for note- 
wallet, for diary and pocket-book — why, bless me, you 
can hardly mention a thing I haven't a pocket for. 
And I would not do without one of them, madam — 
not one. Do I ever lose things? Of course I lose 
things. I lose them in my pockets. You can't pos- 
sibly have as many pockets as I have got without losing 
things in them. But then you have them all the time. 

That is the splendid thing about losing your prop- 
erty in your own pockets. It always turns up in the 
end, and that lady's satchel left on the counter will 
never turn up. And think of the surprises you get 
when rummaging in your pockets — the letters you 
haven't answered, the bills you haven't paid, the odd 
money that has somehow got into the wrong pocket. 
When I have nothing else to do I just search my 
pockets — all my pockets, those in the brown suit, and 
the grey suit, and the serge suit, and my "Sunday best" 
— there must be fifty pockets in all, and every one of 
them full of something, of ghosts of engagements I 
haven't kept, and duties I haven't performed, and 
friends I have neglected, of pipes that I have mourned 




Meeting of the S. P. P. A. W. 



i8 ON POCKETS AND THINGS 

a$ lost, and half packets of cigarettes that by some 
miracle I have not smoked, and all the litter of a 
casual and disorderly life, I would not part with 
these secrecies for all the satchels in Oxford Street. 
I am my own book of mysteries. I bulge with mys- 
teries. I can surprise myself at any moment I like 
by simply exploring my pockets. If I avoid exploring 
them I know I am not very well. I know I am not 
in a condition to face the things that I might find 
there. I just leave them there till I am stronger — not 
lost, madam, as they would be in your satchel, but 
just forgotten, comfortably forgotten. Why should one 
always be disturbing the sleeping dogs in the kennels 
of one's pockets ? Why not let them sleep ? Are there 
not enough troubles in life that one must go seeking 
them in one's own pockets? And I have a precedent, 
look you. Did not Napoleon say that if you did not 
look at your letters for a fortnight you generally found 
that they had answered themselves? 

And may I not in this connection recall the practice 
of Sir Andrew Clarke, the physician of Mr. Gladstone, 
as recorded in the reminiscences of Mr. Henry Holi- 
day? At dinner one night Sir Andrew was observed 
to be drinking champagne and was asked why he al- 
lowed himself an indulgence which he so rigorously 
denied to his patients. "Yes," he said, "but you do not 
understand my case. When I go from there I shall 
find a pile of fifty or sixty letters awaiting answers." 
"But will champagne help you to answer them?" asked 
the other. "Not at all," said Sir Andrew, "not at 
all ; but it puts you in the frame of mind in which you 



ON POCKETS AND THINGS 19 

don't care a damn whether they are answered or not." 
I do not offer this story for the imitation of youth but 
for the solace of people like myself who have long 
reached the years of discretion without becoming dis- 
creet and who like to feel that their weaknesses have 
been shared by the eminent and the wise. 

And, to conclude, the wisdom of the pocket habit 
is not to be judged by its abuse, but by its obvious 
convenience and safety. I trust that some energetic 
woman will be moved to inaugurate a crusade for the 
redemption of her sex from its pocketless condition. 
A Society for the Propagation of Pockets Among 
Women (S.P.P.A.W.) is a real need of the time. 
It should be a part of the great work of after-the-war 
reconstruction. It should organise opinion, distribute 
leaflets and hold meetings, with the Mayor in the 
chair and experts, rich in pockets and the lore of the 
subject, to light the fire of rebellion throughout the 
land. Women have won the vote from the tyrant man. 
Let them win their pockets from the tyrant dress- 
maker. 





ON A COUNTRY PLATFORM 



The fields lie cheek-by-jowl with the station, and a 
group of high elms, in which dwells a colony of rooks, 
throws its ample shadow over the "down" platform. 

From the cornfield that marches side by side with 
the station there comes the cheerful music of the 
reaper and the sound of the voices of the harvesters, 
old men, some women and more children — for half 
of the field has been reaped and is being gathered 
and gleaned. They are so near that the engine- 
driver of the "local" train exchanges gossip with them 
in the intervals of oiling his engine. They talk of 
the crops and the bad weather there has been and the 
change that has come with September, and the news 
of boys who are fighting or have fallen. . . . 

A dozen youths march, two by two, on to the 
"up" platform. They are in civilian dress, but behind 
them walks a sergeant who ejaculates "left — left — 
left" like the flick of a whip. They are the latest 
trickle from this countryside to the great whirlpool, 

20 



ON A COUNTRY PLATFORM 21 

most of them mere boys. They have the self-conscious- 
ness of obscure country youths who have suddenly been 
thrust into the public eye and are aware that all 
glances are turned critically upon their awkward 
movements. They shamble along with a grotesque 
caricature of a dare-devil swagger, and laugh loud 
and vacantly to show how much they are at ease with 
themselves and the world. It is hollow gaiety and 
suggests the animation of a trout with a hook in its 
throat. 

The booking-clerk, lounging at the door of the 
booking-office, passes a half-contemptuous remark 
upon them to a companion. 

"Wait till they come for you, Jimmy," says the 
other. "You won't find it so funny then." 

Jimmy's face falls at the reminder, for he is nearly 
ripe for the great harvest, and the reaper will soon 
come his way. . . . 

A few people drift in from outside as the time 
for the departure of the London train approaches. 
Among them, a young woman, hot and flushed and 
carrying a country basket, is greeted by an acquaint- 
ance with surprise. 

"What are you doing here?" 

"I'm going to London — ^just as I am — a telegram 
from Tom — he's got leave — isn't it glorious — and all 
so unexpected — couldn't change, or even drop my 
basket — the messenger met me in the street — hadn't a 
moment to lose to catch the train," . . . 

A little group brushes by her with far other emotions. 
A stalwart soldier, a bronzed, good-looking fellow, 



22 ON A COUNTRY PLATFORM 

with three stripes, who has evidently seen much 
service, is returning from leave. His wife, neatly 
dressed and with head down, wheels a perambulator 
beside him. Inside the perambulator is a child of 
three years or so. Two other children, of perhaps 
five and six, walk with the soldier, each clasping a 
hand. The little procession passes in silence to the 
end of the platform, full of that misery which seeks 
to be alone with itself. . . . 

Over the wooden bridge that connects the two 
platforms comes a solitary soldier, laden with his 
belongings. He has come in from some other village 
by the local train. He flings himself down on the 
form and stares gloomily at the elms and the cornfield 
and the sunshine. A comfortable-looking, elderly 
man, who has a copy of the London Corn Circular in 
his hand, turns to him with that amiable desire to be 
friendly which elderly people have in the presence of 
soldiers. 

"And how long have you been out at the war, 
sonny?" he asks, much as he might ask how long 
holiday he had had, 

"I'm sick of the bloody war," says the soldier, 
without even turning his head. 

The comfortable, elderly man collapses into silence 
and the Corn Circular. . . . 

A young officer who has been driven up in a dog- 
cart comes on the platform accompanied by a dog 
with tongue lolling from its mouth and with the large, 
brown, affectionate eyes of the Airedale. 

The train thunders in, and the officer opens a 



ON A COUNTRY PLATFORM 23 

carriage door. The dog tries to enter with his master. 

"No, no, old chap," says the latter, gently patting 
him and pulling him back. "Go home. They don't 
want you where I'm going." 

The dog stands for a moment on the platform, 
panting and gazing at his master as if hoping that 
he will relent. Then he turns and trots away, throw- 
ing occasional glances back on the off-chance of a 
whistle of recall. . . . 

The moment has come for the separation of the 
little family at the end of the platform. The soldier 
leans from the carriage window and his wife clings 
about his neck. The two children stand by the 
perambulator. They are brave little girls and re- 
member that they have not to cry. The train begins 
to move and the woman unclasps herself, leaving her 
husband at the window, smiling his hardest and 
throwing kisses to the children. The train gathers 
speed and takes a curve and the soldier has vanished. 
The mother turns to the perambulator and seeks to 
hide her face as she hurries with her little charges 
along the platform and through the gate. The two 
little girls stifle their sobs in their aprons, but the 
child in the carriage knows nothing of public behaviour. 
He knows in that dim way that is the affliction of 
childhood that something terrible is happening, and 
as the forlorn little group hurries by to escape into 
the lane hard by where grief can have its fill he rends 
the air with his sobs and cries of "Poor dada, poor 
dada!" 



24 



ON A COUNTRY PLATFORM 



Poor little mite, he is beginning his apprenticeship 
to this rough, insane world betimes. . . . 

And now the platform is empty, and the only sound 
of life is the whirr of the reaping machine and the 
voices from the harvest field. Through the meadow 
that leads to the village the dog is slowly trotting 
home, still casting occasional glances backwards on the 
chance. . . . 




%4r 




ON A DISTANT VIEW OF A PIG 



Yes, I would ceftainly keep a pig. The idea came 
to me while I was digging. I find that there is no 
occupation that stimulates thought more than digging 
if you choose your soil well. Digging in the London 
clay does not stimulate thought; it deadens thought. 
It is good exercise for the body, but it is no exercise 
for the mind. You can't play with your fancies as 
you plunge your spade into this stiff and stubborn 
medium. But in the light, porous soil of my garden 
on the chalk hills digging goes with a swing and a 
rhythm that set the thoughts singing like the birds. 
I feel I could win battles when I'm digging, or write 
plays or lyrics that would stun the world, or make 

25 



26 ON A DISTANT VIEW OF A PIG 

speeches that wculd stir a post to action. Ideas seem 
as plentiful as blackberries in autumn, and if only I 
could put down the spade and capture them red-hot 
I feel that I could make The Star simply blaze with 
glory. 

It was in one of these prolific moments that I 
thought of the pig. Like all great ideas there was 
something inevitable about it. The calculations of Le 
Verrier and Adams proved the existence of Neptune 
before that orb was discovered. They knew it was 
there before they found it. My pig was born with- 
out my knowledge. In the furnace of my mind he 
took shape merely by the friction of facts. He was a 
sort of pig by divine right. It was like this. In the 
midst of my digging Jim Squire, passing up the lane, 
had paused on the other side of the hedge to discuss 
last night's frost. I straightened my back for a talk, 
and naturally we talked about potatoes. If you want 
to get the best out of Jim Squire you must touch him 
on potatoes. There are some people who find Jim 
an unresponsive and suspicious yokel. That is because 
they do not know how to draw him out. Mention 
potatoes, or carrots, or the best way of dealing with 
slugs, or the right manure for a hot-bed, or any sen- 
sible subject like these, and he simply flows with wis- 
dom and urbanity. 

He observed that I should have a tidy few potatoes, 
what with the garden I was digging, and the piece I'd 
turned over in the orchard, and that there bit o' waste 
land on the hillside which he had heard as I was get- 
ting Mestur Wistock to plough up for me. Yes, 



ON A DISTANT VIEW OF A PIG 27 

there'd be a niceish lot. And he did hear I was going 
to set King Edwards and Arran Chiefs. Rare and 
fine potatoes they were too. He had some King Ed- 
wards last year — turned out wonderful, they did. One 
root he pulled up weighed 12 lb. Yes, Miss Mary 
weighed 'em for him in the scale at the farm — just 
for a hobby like as you might say. It was like this. 
He'd seen a bit in the paper about a man as had 8 lb. 
on a root, and he (Jim) said to himself, "This root 
beats that by a long chalk / know." And Miss Mary 
come by and she said she'd weigh 'em. And she did. 
And it was 12 lb. full, she said. If anything, she said, 
'twas a shade over. She said as they'd have took a 
prize anywhere — that's what she said. . . . Well, you 
couldn't have too many potatoes these days. Wonder- 
ful good food they were, for man and pig. . • . 

As he went on up the lane my spade took up that 
word like a refrain. At every rhythmic stroke it 
seemed to cry "pig" with increasing vehemence. 

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies 
When a new planet swims into his ken. 

A pig? Why not? — and I straightened my back again. 
I felt that something prodigious was taking shape. 
My eye wandered across the orchard. There were 
the hives standing in a row — three of them, to be in- 
creased to twelve as fast as the expert, who has set 
up her carpenter's shop in the barn, can get the parts 
to put together. And beyond the hives three sheds — 
one for poultry, one for the hotbed for mushrooms, 



28 ON A DISTANT VIEW OF A PIG 

the third — why, the very thing . . . Concrete the 
floor and it would be a very palace for a pig. 

I took a turn up the garden to look this thing 
squarely in the face, and at the gate I saw the farmer's 
wife coming down the lane. We stopped, and she 
talked about her cows and about an order she had 
got from the Government to plough up more pasture, 
and then — as if echoing the very thought that was 
drumming in my head — about the litter of pigs she 
was expecting and of her wish to get the cottagers 
to keep pigs. Why, this was a very conspiracy of 
circumstance, thought I. It seemed as though man 
and events alike were engaged in a plot to make me 
keep a pig. 

With an air of idle curiosity I encouraged the 
farmer's wife to talk on the thrilling theme, and she 
responded with enthusiasm. The pig, I found, was 
a grossly maligned animal. It had lain uncomplain- 
ingly under imputations that were foul slanders on 
its innocent and lovable character. Yes, lovable. She 
had had pigs who were as affectionate as any dog — 
pigs that followed her about in sheer friendliness. And 
as for the charge of filthiness, who was to blame ? We 
gave them dirty styes and then called them dirty pigs. 
But the pig was a clean animal, loved cleanliness, 
thrived on cleanliness. It was man the dirty who 
kept the pig foul and then called him unclean. And 
what a profitable animal. She had had a sow which 
in four and a half years had produced io8 pigs and 
102 of them came to maturity. What an example to 



ON A DISTANT VIEW OF A PIG 29 

Shoreditch, I said. Perhaps they don't give them clean 
styes in Shoreditch, she said. No, I replied, they give 
them dirty styes. . . . 

I went indoors, suffused with the vision of the trans- 
figured pig, the affectionate, cleanly, intelligent pig, 
and took up a paper, and the first thing my eye en- 
countered was an article on "The Cottager's Pig." 1 
read it with the frenzy of a new religion and rose 
filled to the brim with lore about the animal to whose 
existence (except in the shape of bacon) I had been 
indifferent so long. And now, fully seized with the 
idea, it seemed that the world talked of nothing but 
pig. It was only that my ears were unstopped and 
my eyes unsealed by an awakened curiosity; but it 
seemed to me that the pig had suddenly been born 
into the universe, and that the air was filled with the 
rumour of his coming. I encountered the subject at 
every turn. In the Times I read a touching lament 
over the disappearance of the little black pig. Else- 
where I saw a facsimile letter from Lord Rhondda, 
in which he declared his loyalty to the pig and denied 
that he had ever spoken evil of him. 

It was a patriotic duty to keep a pig. He was an 
ally in the war. I saw the whole German General 
Staff turning pale at his name, as Mazarin was said 
to turn pale at the name of Cromwell. Arriving in 

town I met that eminent politician Mr. R and 

he began to tell me how he had started all his cottagers 
in the North growing pig. By nightfall I could have 
held my own without shame or discredit in any com- 



30 ON A DISTANT VIEW OF A PIG 

pany of pig dealers, and in my dreams I saw the great 
globe itself resting on the back, not of an elephant, but 
of a pig with a beautiful curly tail. 

Later: I have ordered the pig. 





IN DEFENCE OF IGNORANCE 



A YOUNG man wrote to me the other day lamenting 
his ignorance and requesting me to tell him what books 
to read and what to do in order to become learned and 
wise. I sent him a civil answer and such advice as 
occurred to me. But I confess that the more I thought 
of the matter the less assured I felt of my competence 
for the task. I ceased to be flattered by the implied 
tribute to my omniscience, and felt rather like a per- 
son who gives up a third-class ticket after he has 
ridden in a first-class carriage might feel. I surveyed 
my title to this reputation for learning, and was shocked 
at the poverty of my estate. As I contrasted the moun- 
tain of things I didn't know with the molehill of things 
I did know, my self-esteem shrank to zero. Why, my 
dear young sir, thought I, I cannot pay twopence in 
the pound. I am nothing but the possessor of a wide- 
spread ignorance. Why should you come to me for a 
loan? 

I begin with myself — this body of me that is carried 
about on a pair of cunningly devised stilts and waves 
a couple of branches with five flexible twigs at the end 
of each, and is surmounted by a large round knob with 

31 



32 IN DEFENCE OF IGNORANCE 

wonderful little orifices, and glittering jewels, and a 
sort of mat for a covering, and which utters strange 
noises and speaks and sings and laughs and cries. Bless 
me, said I, what do I know about it? I am a mere 
bundle of mysteries in coat and breeches. I couldn't 
tell you where my epiglottis is or what it does without 
looking in a dictionary. I have been told, but I always 
forget. I am little better than the boy in the class. 
"Where is the diaphragm?" asked the teacher. "Please, 
sir, in North Staffordshire," said the boy, I may laugh 
at the boy, but any young medical student would laugh 
just as much at me if I told him honestly what I do 
not know about the diaphragm. And when it comes 
to the ultimate mysteries of this aggregation of atoms 
which we call the human body the medical student and, 
indeed, the whole Medical Faculty would be found to 
be nearly as ignorant as the boy was about the dia- 
phragm. 

From myself I pass to all the phenomena of life, 
and wherever I turn I find myself exploring what 
Carlyle calls the "great, deep sea of Nescience on 
which we float like exhalations that are and then are 
not." I see Orion striding across the southern heavens, 
and feel the wonder and the majesty of that stupendous 
spectacle, but if I ask myself what I know about it 
I have no answer. And even the knowledge of the 
most learned astronomer only touches the fringe of the 
immensity. What is beyond — beyond — beyond? His 
mind is balked, as mine is, almost at the threshold of 
the mighty paradox of a universe which we can con- 
ceive neither as finite nor as infinite, which is unthink- 



IN DEFENCE OF IGNORANCE 33 

able as having limits and unthinkable as having no lim- 
its. As the flowers come on in summer I alw^ays learn 
their names, but I know that I shall have to learn them 
again next year. And as to the mystery of their being, 
by what miracle they grow and transmute the secre- 
tions of the earth and air into life and beauty — why, 
my dear young sir, I am no more communicative than 
the needy knife-grinder. "Story? God bless you, I 
have none to tell, sir." 

I cannot put my hand to anything outside my little 
routine without finding myself meddling with things 
I don't understand. I was digging in the garden just 
now and came upon a patch of ground with roots deep 
down. Some villainous pest, said I, some enemy of 
my carrots and potatoes. Have at them! I felt like 
a knight charging to the rescue of innocence. I 
plunged the fork deeper and deeper and tore at the 
roots, and grew breathless and perspiring. Even now 
I ache with the agonies of that titanic combat. And 
the more I fought the more infinite became the rami- 
fications of those roots. And so I called for the expert 
advice of the young person who was giving some candy 
to her bees in the orchard. She came, took a glance 
into the depths, and said: "Yes, you are pulling up 
that tree." And she pointed to an ivy-grown tree in 
the hedge a dozen yards away. Did I feel foolish, 
young sir? Of course I felt foolish, but not more 
foolish than I have felt on a thousand other occasions. 
And you ask me for advice. 

I recall one among many of these occasions for my 
chastening. When I was young I was being driven 



34 IN DEFENCE OF IGNORANCE 

one day through a woodland country by an old fellow 
who kept an inn and let out a pony and chaise for 
hire. As we went along I made some remark about 
a tree by the wayside and he spoke of it as a poplar. 
"Not a poplar," said I with the easy assurance of 
youth, and I described to him for his information the 
characters of what I conceived to be the poplar. "Ah," 
he said, "you are thinking of the Lombardy poplar. 
That tree is the Egyptian poplar." And then he went 
on to tell me of a score of other poplars — their appear- 
ance, their habits, and their origins — quite kindly and 
without any knowledge of the withering blight that 
had fallen upon my cocksure ignorance. I found that 
he had spent his life in tree culture and had been 
forester to a Scotch duke. And I had explained to 
him what a poplar was like! But I think he did me 
good, and I often recall him to mind when I feel dis- 
posed to give other people information that they pos- 
sibly do not need. 

And the books I haven't read, and the sciences I 
don't know, and the languages I don't speak, and the 
things I can't do — young man, if you knew all this 
you would be amazed. But it does not make me un- 
happy. On the contrary I find myself growing cheer- 
ful in the contemplation of these vast undeveloped es- 
tates. I feel like a fellow who has inherited a conti- 
nent and, so far, has only had time to cultivate a tiny 
corner of the inheritance. The rest I just wander 
through like a boy in wonderland. Some day I will 
know about all these things. I will develop all these 
immensities. I will search out all these mysteries. In 



IN DEFENCE OF IGNORANCE 35 

my heart I know I shall do nothing of the sort. I 
know that when the curtain rings down I shall be 
digging the same tiny plot. But it is pleasant to dream 
of future conquests that you won't make. 

And, after all, aren't we all allotment holders of 
the mind, cultivating our own little patch and sur- 
rounded by the wonderland of the unknown? Even 
the most learned of us is ignorant when his knowl- 
edge is measured by the infinite sum of things. And 
the riches of knowledge themselves are much more 
widely diffused than we are apt to think. There are 
few people who are not better informed about some- 
thing than we are, who have not gathered their own 
peculiar sheaf of wisdom or knowledge in this vast 
harvest field of experience. That is at once a com- 
fortable and a humbling thought. It checks a too 
soaring vanity on the one hand and a too tragic abase- 
ment on the other. The fund of knowledge is a col- 
lective sum. No one has all the items, nor a fraction 
of the items, and there are few of us so poor as not 
to have some. If I were to walk out into the street 
now I fancy I should not meet a soul, man or woman, 
who could not fill in some blank of my mind. And I 
think — for I must not let humility go too far — I think 
I could fill some blank in theirs. Our carrying capac- 
ity varies infinitely, but we all carry something, and it 
differs from the store of any one else on earth. And, 
moreover, the mere knowledge of things is not necessary 
to their enjoyment, nor necessary even to wisdom. 
There are things that every ploughboy knows to-day 
which were hidden from Plato and Csesar and Dante, 



36 IN DEFENCE OF IGNORANCE 

but the ploughboy is not wiser than they. Sir Thomas 
Browne, in his book on Vulgar Errors, declared that 
the idea that the earth went round the sun was too 
foolish to be controverted. I know better, but that 
doesn't make me a wiser man than Browne. Wisdom 
does not depend on these things. I suppose that, on the 
whole, Lincoln was the wisest and most fundamentally 
sane man who ever took a great part in the affairs of 
this planet. Yet compared with the average under- 
graduate he was utterly unlearned. 

Do not, my young friend, suppose I am decrying 
your eagerness to know. Learn all you can, my boy, 
about this wonderful caravan on which we make 
our annual tour round the sun, and on which we quar- 
rel and fight with such crazy ferocity as we go. But 
at the end of all your learning you will be astonished 
at how little you know, and will rejoice that the pleas- 
ure of living is in healthy feeling rather than in the ac- 
cumulation of facts. There was a good deal of truth 
in that saying of Savonarola that "a little old woman 
who kept the faith knew more than Plato or Aristotle." 




ON A SHINY NIGHT 



The pleasantest hour of my day is the hour about 
midnight. It is then that I leave the throbbing heart 
of Fleet Street behind me, jump on to the last bus 
bound for a distant suburb, and commandeer <■' e back 
corner seat. If the back seat is not vacant I sit as near 
as I can and v^^atch the enemy who possesses it with 
a vigilant eye. When he rises I pounce on the quarry 
like a kestrel on its prey. I love the back seat, not only 
because it is the most comfortable, but also because 
it gives you the sense of solitude in the midst of a 
crowd, which is one of the most enjoyable sensations 
I know. To see and not be seen, to watch the human 
comedy unobserved, save by the friendly stars who 
look down very searchingly but never blab, to have the 
advantages of both solitude and society in one breath, 
as it were — this is my idea of enjoyment. 

But most of all I love the back seat on such a 
37 



38 ON A SHINY NIGHT 

night as last night, when the crescent moon is sailing 
high in a cloudless sky and making all the earth a 
wonder of romance. The garish day is of the earth, 
"the huge and thoughtful night" when no moon is 
seen and the constellations blaze in unimaginable space 
is of the eternal; but here in this magic glamour of 
the moon where night and day are wedded is the realm 
of romance. You may wander all day in the beech 
woods and never catch a glimpse of Tristan and Iseult 
coming down the glades or hear an echo of Robin 
Hood's horn ; but walk in the woods by moonlight and 
every shadow will have its mystery and will talk to 
you of the legends of long ago. 

That was why Sir Walter Scott had such a passion 
for "Cumnor Hall." "After the labours of the day 
were over," said Irving, "we often walked in the 
meadows, especially in the moonlight nights; and he 
seemed never weary of repeating the first stanza: — 

The dews of summer night did fall — 
The moon, sweet regent of the sky. 

Silvered the walls of Cumnor Hall, 
And many an oak that stood thereby." 

There you have the key to all the world of Sir Walter. 
He was the King of the Moonlighters. He was a 
man who would have been my most dreaded rival 
on the midnight bus. He would have wanted the 
back seat, I know, and there he would have sat and 
chanted "Cumnor Hall" to himself and watched the 
moonlight touching the suburban streets to poetry and 



ON A SHINY NIGHT 39 

turning every suburban garden into a twilight mystery. 

There are, of course, quite prosaic and even wicked 
people who love "a shiny night." There is, for ex- 
ample, the gentleman from "famous Lincolnshire" 
whose refrain is: — 

Oh, 'tis my delight 

On a shiny night. 

In the season of the year. 

I love his song because it is about the moonlight, and 
I am not sure that I am much outraged by the fact 
that he liked the shiny night because he was a poacher. 
I never could affect any indignation about poachers. 
I suspect that I rather like them. Anyhow, there is no 
stanza of that jolly song which I sing with more 
heartiness than : — 

Success to every gentleman that lives in Lincolnshire, 
Success to every poacher that wants to sell a hare. 
Bad luck to every gamekeeper that will not sell his deer. 
Oh, 'tis my delight, etc. 

And there was Dick Turpin. He, too, loved the 
moonlight for very practical reasons. He loved it not 
because it silvered the oak, but because of that deep 
shadow of the oak in which he could stand with Black 
Bess and await the coming of his victim. 

And it is that shadow which is the real secret of 
the magic of moonlight. The shadows of the day 
have beauty but no secrecy. The sunlight is too strong 
to be wholly or even very materially denied. Even 



40 ON A SHINY NIGHT 

its shadows are luminous and full of colour, and the 
contrast between light and shade is not the contrast 
between the visible and the invisible, between the light 
and the dark: it is only a contrast between degrees of 
brightness. Everything is bright, but some things are 
more bright than others. But in the moonlight the 
world is etched in black and white. The shadows are 
flat and unrevealing. They have none of the colour 
values produced by the reflected lights in the shadows 
of the day. They are as secret as the grave ; distinct 
personalities, sharply figured against the encompassing 
light, not mere passages of colour tuned to a lower key. 
And the quality of the encompassing light itself em- 
phasises the contrast. The moon does not bring out 
the colour of things, but touches them with a glacial 
pallor — 

.... Strange she is, and secret. 
Strange her eyes ; her cheeks are cold as cold sea-shells. 

See the moonlight fall upon your house-front and 
mark the wonderful effect of black and white that 
it creates. Under the play of the moonbeams it be- 
comes a house of mysteries. The lights seem lighter 
than by day, but that is only because the darks are so 
much darker. That shadow cast by the gable makes 
a blackness in which anything may lurk, and it is the 
secrecy of the shadow in a world of light that is the 
soul of romance. 

Take a walk in the woods in the bright moonlight 
over tracks that you think you could follow blindfold, 
and you will marvel at the tricks which those black 



ON A SHINY NIGHT 41 

shadows of the trees can play with the most familiar 
scenes. Keats, who was as much of a moonlighter in 
spirit as Scott, knew those impenetrable shadows 
well : — 

.... tender is the night, 

And haply the Queen-moon Is on her throne, 

Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays; 

But here there is no light, 
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown 
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. 

In this moonlight world you may skip at will from 
the known to the unknown, have pu-blicity on one side 
of the way and secrecy on the other, walk in the light 
to see Jessica's face, and in the shadow to escape the 
prying eyes of Shylock. Hence through all time it has 
been the elysium of lovers, and "Astarte, queen of 
heaven, with crescent horns," has been the goddess 
whom they serve, 

To whose bright image nightly by the moon, 
Sidonian virgins paid their vows and songs. 

Perhaps it is the eternal lover in us that responds so 
unfailingly to the magic of the moonlight. 




ON GIVING UP TOBACCO 



This evening I am morally a little unapproachable 
I feel too good to be true. Perhaps it would be pos- 
sible for me to endure the company of Mr. Pecksniff; 
but that good man is dead, and I am lonely in a world 
that is not quite up to my moral handicap. For 
I have given up tobacco. For a whole day not a 
wreath of smoke has issued from my lips, not a pipe, 
or a cigar, or a cigarette has had the victory over me. 
. . . For a whole day ! I had not realised how long a 
day could be. It is as though I have ceased to live in 
time and have gone into eternity. I once heard a man 
say: "Dear me! How time flies!" It struck me at the 
moment as a true and penetrating remark, and I have 
often repeated it since. But now I know it to be false. 
I know that that man must have been a slave to to- 
bacco, that subtle narcotic that gives the illusion of the 
flight of time. If he had the moral courage to fol- 
low my example, he would not say "How times flies!" 
He would say, as I do (with tears in his voice, and 
with a glance at his pipe on the mantelpiece), "How 

42 



ON GIVING UP TOBACCO 43 

time stands still!" He would find that a day can 
seem as long as a year; that he can lengthen his life 
until he is terrified at the prospect of its endless- 
ness. 

I have been contemplating this thing for years. 
Some day, I have said to myself, I will have a real 
trial of strength with this Giant Nicotine who has 
held me thrall to his service. Long have I borne his 
yoke — ever since that far-off day when I burned a hole 
in my jacket pocket with a lighted cigar that I hid 
at the approach of danger. (How well I remember 
that day: the hot sunshine, the walk in the fields, the 
sense of forbidden joys, the tragedy of the burnt hole, 
the miserable feeling of physical nausea.) I have 
kicked against the tyranny of a habit that I knew had 
become my master. It was not the tobacco I disliked. 
Far from it. I liked the tobacco ; but disliked the habit 
of tobacco. The tendency of most of us is to become 
creatures of habit and to lose our freedom — to cease 
to be masters of our own actions. "Take away his 
habits, and there is nothing of him left," says a char- 
acter in some play, and the saying has a wide appli- 
cation. I did not possess a pipe: it was the pipe that 
possessed me. I did not say with easy, masterful as- 
surance, "Come, I have had a hard day (or a good 
dinner) ; I will indulge myself with a pipe of tobacco." 
It was the pipe which said, "Come, slave, to your de- 
votions." And though as the result of one of my spirit- 
ual conflicts I threw away my pipe and resolved to 
break the fall with an occasional cigarette, I found it 



44 ON GIVING UP TOBACCO 

was only the old tyrannous habit in a new disguise. 
The old dog in a new coat, as Johnson used to 
say. 

There are some people who approach this question 
frivolously. The young man called John in the 
"Breakfast Table" is an example. When the lady 
in bombazine denounced tobacco and said it ought all 
to be burned, the young man John agreed. Someone 
had given him a box of cigars, he said, and he was 
going to burn them all. The lady in bombazine re- 
joiced. Let him make a bonfire of them in the back- 
yard, she said. "That ain't my way," replied the young 
man called John. "I burn 'em one at a time — little 
end in my mouth, big end outside." Similarly want- 
ing in seriousness was the defence of tobacco set up by 
the wit who declared that it prolonged life. "Look at 
the ancient Egyptians," he said. "None of them 
smoked, and they are all dead." Others again discover 
virtues to conceal the tyranny. Lord Clarendon, when 
he was Foreign Minister, excused the fact that his room 
always reeked with tobacco smoke on the ground that 
it was necessary to his work. "The art of diplomacy," 
he said, "is the judicious administration of tobacco." 
No one knew better how to handle a cigar case than 
Bismarck, and it is no very extravagant fancy to see 
in the events of to-day the enormous fruit of an inter- 
lude of tobacco between him and Disraeli in the coun- 
cil chamber at Berlin. 

There are some who say they smoke because it 
soothes their nerves, and others who say they smoke 




"The art of diplomacy. . . . 



46 ON GIVING UP TOBACCO 

because it is an aid to social intercourse. It is true 
that you can sit and smoke and say nothing without 
feeling that the spirit of communion is broken. That 
was the case of Carlyle and his mother and of Carlyle 
and Tennyson, brave smokers all and silent to boot. 
They let their pipes carry on a conversation too deep 
for words. And lesser people, as Cowper knew, con- 
ceal their bankruptcy of words in wreaths of smoke : — 

The pipe, with solemn, interposing puflf, 
Makes half a sentence at a time enough; 
The dozing sages drop the drowsy strain, 
Then pause, and puff, and speak, and puff again. 

And, while some say they smoke for company, others 
claim to smoke for thought and inspiration. "Tobacco 
is the sister of Literature," says Sir Walter Raleigh, 
loyal in this to his great namesake who brought the 
good gift to our shores. Heaven forbid that I should 
deny the debt we who write owe to tobacco, but I am 
bound to confess that brother Literature did some hand- 
some things before he found his sister. Homer and 
Euripides, Virgil and Horace wrote quite tolerably 
without the help of tobacco, though no one can read 
Horace without feeling that he had the true spirit of 
the tobacco cult. Had he been born a couple of thou- 
sand years later what praises of the weed of Havana he 
would have mingled with his praises of Falernian. 

But if we are honest with ourselves we shall admit 
that we smoke not for this or that respectable reason 



ON GIVING UP TOBACCO 47 

— not always even because we enjoy it — but because 
we have got into the habit and can't get out of it. 
And in this, as in other cases, it is the surrender of 
the will more than the thing yielded to that is the 
mischief. All the great systems of religion have pro- 
vided against the. enslavement of the individual to his 
habits. The ordinances of abstinence are designed, in 
part at all events, to keep the will master of the 
appetites. They are intended — altogether apart from 
the question of salvation by works — to serve as 
a breach with habits which, if allowed uninter- 
rupted sway, reduce the soul to a sort of bondage to 
the body. 

It is against that bondage of habit that I have 
warred to-day. I shall not describe the incidents of 
the struggle : the allurements of the tobacconists' shops 
— and what a lot of tobacconists' shops there are! — 
the insidious temptation of a company of men smoking 
contentedly after lunch, the heroism of waving away 
the offered cigarette or cigar as though it were a mat- 
ter of no importance, the constant act of refusal. For 
this is no case of one splendid deed of heroism. You 
do not slay Apollyon with a thrust of your sword and 
march triumphantly on your way. You have to go on 
fighting every inch of the journey, deaf to the appeals 
of Gold Flake and Capstan and Navy Cut and the 
other syrens that beckon you from the shop windows. 
And now evening has come and the victory is mine. I 
have singed the beard of the giant. I am no longer his 
thrall. To-morrow I shall be able to smoke with a 



48 



ON GIVING UP TOBACCO 



clear conscience — with the feeling that it is an act of 
my own free choice, and not an act of a slavish obedi- 
ence to an old habit. . . . 
How I shall enjoy to-morrow! 





THE GREAT GOD GUN 



A FEW days ago I saw the Advent of the Great God 
Gun. The goddess Aphrodite, according to ancient 
mythology, rose out of the foam of the sea, and the 
Great God Gun, too, emerged from a bath, but it was 
a bath of fire — fire so white and intense that the eyes 
were blinded by it as they are blinded by the light of 
the unclouded sun at mid-day. 

Our presence had been timed for the moment of his 
coming. We stood in a great chamber higher than a 
cathedral nave, and with something even less than the 
dim religious light of a cathedral nave. The exterior 
of the temple was plain even to ugliness, a tower of 
high, windowless walls faced with corrugated iron. 
Within was a maze of immense mysteries, mighty 
cylinders towering into the gloom above, great pits 
descending into the gloom below, gigantic cranes show- 
ing against the dim skylight, with here and there a 

49 



50 THE GREAT GOD GUN 

Cyclopean figure clad in oily overalls and with a face 
grimy and perspiring. 

The signal was given. Two shadowy figures that 
appeared in the darkness above one of the cylinders 
began their incantations. A giant crane towered 
above them and one saw its mighty claw descend into 
the orifice of the cylinder as if to drag some Eurydice 
out of the hell within. Then the word was spoken and 
somewhere a lever, or perhaps only an electric button, 
was touched. But at that touch the whole front of 
the mighty cylinder from top to bottom opened and 
swung back slowly and majestically, and one stood 
before a pillar of flame forty feet high, pure and white, 
an infinity of intolerable light, from whence a wave 
of heat came forth like a living thing. And as the 
door opened the Cyclops above — strange Dantesque 
figures now swallowed up in the gloom, now caught 
in the light of the furnace — ^set the crane in motion, 
and through the open door of the cylinder came the 
god, suspended from the claw of the crane that gripped 
it like the fingers of a hand. 

It emerged slowly like a column of solid light — 
mystic, wonderful. All night it had stood imprisoned 
in the cylinder enveloped by that bath of incalculable 
hotness, and as it came out from the ordeal, it was 
as white as the furnace within. The great hand of the 
crane bore it forward with a solemn slowness until 
it paused over the mouth of one of the pits. I 
had looked into this pit and seen that it was filled 
nearly to the brim with a slimy liquid. It was a pit 



THE GREAT GOD GUN 51 

of oil — tens of thousands of gallons of highflash rape 
oil. It was the second bath of the god. 

The monster, the whiteness of his heat now flushing 
to pink, paused above the pit. Then gravely, under 
the direction of the iron hand that held him suspended 
in mid-air, he began to descend into the oil. The 
breech end of the incandescent column touched the 
surface of the liquid, and at that touch there leapt 
out of the mouth of the pit great tongues of flame. 
As the red pillar sank deeper and deeper in the pit 
the flames burst up through the muzzle and licked 
with fury about the ruthless claw as if to tear it to 
pieces. But it would not let go. Lower and lower 
sank the god until even his head was submerged 
and he stood invisible beneath us, robed in his cloak 
of oil. 

And there we will leave him to toughen and harden 
as he drinks in the oil hungrily through his burning 
pores. Soon he will be caught up in the claw of the 
crane again, lifted out of his bath and lowered into 
an empty pit near by. And upon him will descend 
another tube, that has passed through the same trials, 
and that will fit him as the skin fits the body. And 
then in due course he will be provided with yet 
another coat. Round and round him will be wound 
miles of flattened wire, put on at a tension of un- 
thinkable resistance. And even then there remains 
his outer garment, his jacket, to swell still further 
his mighty bulk. After that he will be equipped 
with his brain — all the wonderful mechanism of 
breech and cradle — and then one day he will be 



52 THE GREAT GOD GUN 

carried to the huge structure near by, where the 
Great God Gun, in all his manifestations, from the 
little mountain ten-pounder to the leviathan fifteen- 
inch, rests shining and wonderful, to be sent forth 
with his message of death and destruction. 

The savage, we are told, is misguided enough to 
"bow down to wood and stone." Poor savage! If 
we could only take him, with his childlike intelligence, 
into our temple to see the god that the genius and 
industry of civilised man has created, a god so vast 
that a hundred men could not lift him, of such in- 
credible delicacy that his myriad parts are fitted 
together to the thousandth, the ten-thousandth, and 
even the hundred-thousandth of an inch, and out of 
whose throat there issue thunders and lightnings that 
carry ruin for tens of miles. How ashamed the poor 
savage would be of his idols of wood and stone! How 
he would abase himself before the god of the Christian 
nations! 

And what a voracious deity he is! Here in the great 
arsenal of Woolwich one passes through miles and 
miles of bewildering activities, foundries where the 
forty-ton hammer falls with the softness of a caress 
upon the great column of molten metal, and gives 
it the first crude likeness of the god, where vast con- 
verters are sending out flames of an unearthly hue and 
brightness or where men clothed in grime and per- 
spiration are swinging about billets of steel that scorch 
you as they pass from the furnace to the steam-press 
in which they are stamped like putty into the rough 
shape of great shells; shops where the roar of thou- 



THE GREAT GOD GUN 53 

sands of lathes drowns the voice and where the food 
of the god is passing through a multitude of prepara- 
tions more delicate than any known to the kitchens of 
Lucullus; pools of silence where grave scientific men 
are at their calculations and their tests, and where 
mechanics who are the princes of their trade show you 
delicate instruments gauged to the hundred-thousandth 
of an inch that are so precious that they will scarcely 
let you handle them; mysterious chambers where the 
high explosives are handled and where the shells are 
filled, where you walk in felt slippers upon padded 
floors and dare not drop a pin lest you wake an 
earthquake, and where you see men working ( for what 
pay I know not) with materials more terrible than 
lightnings, themselves partitioned off from eternity only 
by the scrupulous observance of the meticulous laws of 
this realm of the sleeping Furies. 

A great town — a town whose activities alone are 
equal to all the labour of a city like Leeds — all de- 
voted to the service of the god who lies there, mystic, 
wonderful, waiting to speak his oracles to men. I 
see the poor savage growing more and more ashamed 
of his wood and stone. And this, good savage, is 
only a trifling part of our devotions. All over the 
land wherever you go you shall find furnaces blazing 
to his glory, mountains shattered to make his ribs, 
factories throbbing day and night to feed his gigantic 
maw and to clothe his servants. 

You shall go down to the great rivers and hear a 
thousand hammers beating their music out of the 
hulls of mighty ships that are to be the chariots of 



54 THE GREAT GOD GUN 

the god, in which he will go forth to preach his 
gospel. You shall go down into the bowels of the 
earth and see half-naked men toiling in the black- 
ness by the dim light of the safety lamp to win that 
wonderful food which is the ultimate food of the 
god, power to forge his frame, power to drive his 
chariots, power to wing his bolts. You shall go to 
our temples of learning and the laboratories of oui 
universities and see the miracles of destruction that 
science, the proudest achievement of man, can wring 
out of that astonishing mystery coal-tar. You shall 
go to our ports and watch the ships riding in proudly 
from the seas with their tributes from afar to the 
god. And behind all this activity you shall see a 
nation working day and night to pay for the food 
of the god, throwing all its accumulated wealth into 
the furnace to keep the engines going, pawning its- 
future to the uttermost farthing and to the remotest 
generation. 

And wherever the white man dwells, good savage, 
the same vision awaits you — 

.... where Rhine unto the sea, 
And Thames and Tiber, Seine and Danube run, 
And where great armies glitter in the sun. 
And great kings rule and men are boasted free. 

Everywhere the hammers are ringing, the forests are 
falling, the harvests are being gathered, and men and 
women toil like galley slaves chained to the oar to 
build more and more of the image and feed him more 
lavishly with the food of death. You cannot escape 



THE GREAT GOD GUN 55 

the great traffic of the god though you go to the out- 
posts of the earth. The horses of the pampas are 
being rounded up to drag his waggons, the sheep of 
Australia are being sheared to clothe his slaves, the 
pine trees of Lapland are being split for his service, 
the silence of the Arctic seas is broken by the throb- 
bing of his chariots. As a neutral, good savage, you 
shall be free to go to Essen and see marvels no less 
wonderful than these you have seen at Woolwich, 
and all through Europe from Bremen to the Golden 
Horn the same infinite toil in the service of the Great 
God Gun will greet your astonished eyes. 

Then, it may be, you will pass to where the god 
delivers his message; on sea where one word from 
his mouth sends a thousand men and twenty thou- 
sand tons of metal in one huge dust storm to the 
skies; on land where over hundreds of miles of 
battle front the towns and villages are mounds of 
rubbish, where the desolate earth is riven and 
shattered by that treacly stuff you saw being ladled 
into the shells in the danger rooms at Woolwich or 
Essen, where the dead lie thick as leaves in autumn, 
and where in every wood you will come upon the 
secret shrines of the god. At one light touch of the 
lever he lifts his head, coughs his mighty guttural 
speech and sinks back as if convulsed. He has 
spoken, the earth trembles, the trees about him 
shudder at the shock. And standing in the observa- 
tory you will see far off a great black, billoviy mass 
rise in the clear sky and you will know that the god 
has blowa another god like unto him into fragments. 



56 



THE GREAT GOD GUN 




and that in that mass that rises and falls is the wreck- 
age of many a man who has looked his last upon the 
sun and will never till the home fields again or gladden 
the eyes of those he has left in some distant land. 

And then, to complete your experience, you shall 
hear from the prophets of the Great God Gun the 
praises of his gospel, how that gospel is an abiding 
part of the white man's faith, how it acts as a moral 
medicine to humanity, purging it of its vices and 
teaching it the higher virtues (a visit to the music 
halls and the Strand at midnight will help your simple 
mind to realise this), and how the words of the poet, 
uttered in satii 



That civilisation doos git forrad 
Sometimes upon a powder cart — 

were in truth the words of eternal wisdom. 



THE GREAT GOD GUN 57 

I see the poor savage returning sadly to his home 
and gazing with mingled scorn and humiliation at 
his futile image of wood and stone. Perhaps another 
feeling will mingle with his sadness. Perhaps he 
will be perplexed and puzzled. For he may have 
heard of another religion that the white man serves, 
and it may be difficult for his simple mind to reconcile 
that religion with the gospel of the Great God Gun. 



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sssSSUHKJ^^^?^^i^<9B*iriiiBSiS^£S^^!^^HR^9 






-^ -^"^si^^^i::^.. S"'-^" 'W}!^^imimmm\\mmimki:^ 





ON A LEGEND OF THE WAR 

I WAS going down to the country the other night 
when I fell into conversation with a soldier who was 
going home on leave. He was a reservist, who, after 
leaving the Army, had taken to gardening, and who 
had been called up at the beginning of the war. He 
had many interesting things to tell, w^hich he told 
in that unromantic, matter-of-fact fashion peculiar to 
the British soldier. But something he said about his 
cousin led him to make a reference to Lord Kitchener, 
and I noticed that he spoke of the great soldier as if 
he were living. 

"But," said I, "do you think Kitchener wasn't 
drowned ?" 

"Yes," he replied, "I can't never believe he was 
drowned." 

"But why?" 

"Well, he hadn't no escort. You're not going to 
58 



ON A LEGEND OF THE WAR 59 

make me believe he didn't know what he was doing 
when he went off and didn't have no escort. It 
stands to reason. He wasn't no stick of rhubub, as 
you might say. He was a hard man on the soldier, 
but he had foresight, he had. He could look ahead. 
That's what he could do. He could look ahead. What 
did he say about the war? Three years, he said, or 
the duration, and he was about right. He wasn't the 
man to get drowned by an oversight — not him. Stands 
to reason." 

"Same with Hector Macdonald," he said, warming 
to his theme. "He's alive right enough. He's fighting 
for the Germans. Why, I know a man who seen him 
in a German uniform before the war began. I should 
know him if I see him. He inspected me often. He 
made a fool of himself at Monte Carlo and that sort 
o' thing, and just went off to get a new start, as 
you might say. 

"And look at Hamel. He ain't dead — course not. 
He went to Germany — that's what he did. Stands 
to reason." 

"And what has become of Kitchener?" I asked. "Is 
he fighting for the Germans too?" 

Well, no. That was too tall an order even for his 
credulity. He boggled a bit at the hedge and then 
proceeded : 

"He's laying by — that's what he's doing. He's lay- 
ing by. You see, he'd done his job. He raised his 
army and made the whole job, as you may say, safe, 
and he wasn't going to take a back seat and be put 
in a corner. Not him. Stands to reason. Why 



6o ON A LEGEND OF THE WAR 

should he? And him done all what he had done. So 
he just goes off and lays by until he's wanted again. 
Then he'll turn up all right. You'll see." 

"But the ship was blown up," I said, "and only 
one boatload of survivors came to shore. There were 
800 men who perished with Lord Kitchener. Not 
one has been heard of. Are they all 'laying by'? 
And where are they hiding? And why? And were 
they all in Lord Kitchener's secret?" 

He seemed a little gravelled by these considerations, 
but unmoved. 

"I can't never believe that he's dead," he said with 
the air of a man who didn't want to be awkward and 
would oblige if he possibly could. "I can't do it. . . . 
With his foresight and all. . . . And no escort, mind 
you. . . , No, I can't believe it. . . . Stands to 
reason." 

And as he sank back in his seat and lit a cigarette 
I realised that the legend of Kitchener had passed 
beyond the challenge of death. I had heard much of 
that legend, much of mysterious letters from prisoners 
in Germany who had seen a very tall and formidable- 
looking man and hinted that that man's name was 
— well, whose would you think? Why, of course. . . . 
But here was the popular legend in all its naked 
simplicity and absoluteness. 

It did not rest upon fact. It defied all facts and all 
evidence. It was an act of tyrannic faith. He was 
not dead, because the mind simply refused to believe 
that he was dead. And so he was alive. And there 
vou are. 



ON A LEGEND OF THE WAR 6i 

No doubt there was much in the circumstances of 
the great soldier's end that helped the growth of the 
myth. He filled so vast a place in the public mind 
and vanished so swiftly that his total disappearance 
seemed unthinkable. No living man had seen him 
die and no man had seen his body in death. He had 
just walked out into the night, and from the night 
he would return. 

But, apart from the mystery of circumstance, the 
legend is a tribute to the strange fascination which 
this remarkable man exercised over the popular mind. 
It endowed him with qualities which were super- 
natural. In a world filled with the tragedy of mor- 
tality, here was a man who could daunt death itself. 
And when death stabbed him suddenly in the dark 
of that wild night off the Orkneys and flung his body 
to the wandering seas, the popular mind rejected the 
thought as a sort of blasphemy and insisted on his 
victory over the enemy. "Stands to reason." That's 
all. It just "stands to reason." 

It seems a childish superstition, and yet if we could 
probe this belief to the bottom we might find that 
there is a truth beneath the apparent foolishness. It 
is that truth which Whitman, in his "Drum Taps," 
expresses over his fallen comrade — 

O the bullet could never kill what you really are, dear 

friend. 
Nor the bayonet stab what you really are! 

There is something in the heroic soul that defies death, 
and the simple mind only translates that faith in the 



62 ON A LEGEND OF THE WAR 

deathlessness of the spirit into material terms. Drake 
lies in his hammock in Nombre Dios Bay, but he 
lies "listening for the drum and dreamin' arl the time 
of Plymouth Hoe." 

Call him on the deep sea, call him up the Sound, 
Call him when your powder's running low — 
"If the Dons sight Devon 
I'll leave the port of Heaven, 

And we'll drum them up the Channel as we drummed 
them long ago." 

And so the legend of Drake's drum lives on, and long 
centuries after, in the midst of another and fiercer 
storm, men sail the seas and hear that ghostly inspira- 
tion to brave deeds and brave death. The torch of a 
great spirit never goes out. It is handed on from gen- 
eration to generation and flames brightest when the 
night is darkest. And that I think is the truth that 
dwells at the back of my companion's obstinate cre- 
dulity. Kitchener has become to him a symbol of 
something that cannot die and his non-metaphysical 
mind must have some material immortality to give his 
faith an anchorage. And so, out in the vague shad- 
ows of the borderland he sees the stalwart figure still 
at his post — "laying by," it is true, but watching and 
waiting and "listening for the drum" that shall sum- 
mon him back to the field of action. 

As the train slowed down at a country station and 
he prepared to go out into the night, he repeated in 
firm but friendly accents: "No, I can't never believe 



ON A LEGEND OF THE WAR 63 

that he's dead. . . . Stands to reason." And as he 
bade me "Good-night," I said, "I think you are right. 
I think he is living, too." And as the door closed, I 
added to myself, "Stands to reason." 




ON TALK AND TALKERS 



The other day I went to dine at a house known for 
the brilliancy of the conversation. I confess that I 
found the experience a little trying. In conversa- 
tion I am naturally rather a pedestrian person. The 
talk I like is the talk which Washington Irving 
had in mind when he said that "that is the best com- 
pany in which the jokes are rather small and the 
laughter abundant." I do not want to be expected 
to be brilliant or to be dazzled by verbal pyrotechnics. 
I like to talk in my slippers as it were, with my legs 
at full stretch, my mind at ease, and with all the 
evening before me. Above all, I like the company 
of people who talk for enjoyment and not for admira- 
tion. "I am none of those who sing for meat, but for 
company," says Izaak Walton, and therein is the se- 
cret of good talk as well as of cheerful song. 

64 



ON TALK AND TALKERS 65 

But at this dinner table the conversation flashed 
around me like forked lightning. It was so staccato 
and elusive that it seemed like talking in shorthand. 
It was a very fencing match of wit and epigram, a 
sort of game of touch-and-go, or tip-and-run, or catch- 
as-catch-can, or battledore and shuttlecock, or demon 
patience, or anything you like that is intellectually and 
physically breathless and baffling. I thought of a 
bright thing to say now and then, but I was always 
so slow in getting away from the mark that I never 
got it out. It had grown stale and out of date before 
I could invest it with the artistic merit that would 
enable it to appear in such brilliant company. And 
so, mentally out of breath, I just sat and felt old- 
fashioned and slow, and tried to catch the drift of the 
sparkling dialogue. But I looked as wise as possible, 
just to give the impression that nothing was escaping 
me, and that the things I did not say were quite worth 
saying. That was Henry Irving's way when the con- 
versation got beyond him. He just looked wise and 
said nothing. 

There are few things more enviable than the qual- 
ity of good talk, but this was not good talk. It was 
clever talk, which is quite a different thing. There 
was no "stuff" in it. It was like trying to make a 
meal off the east wind, which it resembled in its hard 
brilliancy and lack of geniality. It reminded me of 
the tiresome witticisms of Mr. Justice Darling, who 
always gives the impression of having just come into 
court from the study of some jest book or a volume 
of appropriate quotations. The foundation of good talk 



66 ON TALK AND TALKERS 

is good sense, good nature, and the gift of fellowship. 
Given these things you may serve them up w^ith the 
sauce of vv^it, but wit alone never made good conver- 
sation. It is like mint-sauce without the lamb. 

Fluent talkers are not necessarily good conversation- 
alists. Macaulay talked as though he were address- 
ing a public meeting, and Coleridge as though he were 
engaged in an argument with space and eternity. "If 
any of you have got anything to say," said Samuel 
Rogers to his guests at breakfast one morning, "you 
had better say it now you have got a chance. Ma- 
caulay is coming." And you remember that whimsical 
story of Lamb cutting oliE the coat button that Cole- 
ridge held him by in the garden at Highgate, going 
for his day's work into the City, returning in the 
evening, hearing Coleridge's voice, looking over the 
hedge and seeing the poet with the button between 
forefinger and thumb still talking into space. His life 
was an unending monologue. "I think, Charles, that 
you never heard me preach," said Coleridge once, speak- 
ing of his pulpit days. "My dear boy," answered 
Lamb, "I never heard you do anything else." 

Johnson's talk had the quality of conversation, be- 
cause, being a clubbable man, he enjoyed the give-and- 
take and the cut-and-thrust of the encounter. He liked 
to "lay his mind to yours" as he said of Thurlow, 
and though he was more than a little "huiify" on oc- 
casion he had that wealth of humanity which is the 
soul of hearty conversation. He quarrelled heartily and 
forgave heartily — as in that heated scene at Sir 
Joshua's when a young stranger had been too talkative 



ON TALK AND TALKERS 67 

and knowing and had come under his sledge hammer. 
Then, proceeds Boswell, "after a short pause, during 
which we were somewhat uneasy; — Johnson: Give me 
your hand, Sir. You were too tedious and I was too 
short. — Mr. : Sir, I am honoured by your atten- 
tion in any way. — Johnson : Come, Sir, let's have no 
more of it. We offended one another by our conten- 
tion ; let us not offend the company by our compli- 
ments." He always had the company in mind. He 
no more thought of talking alone than a boxer would 
think of boxing alone, or the tennis player would think 
of rushing up to the net for a rally alone. He wanted 
something to hit and something to parry, and the 
harder he hit and the quicker he parried the more he 
loved the other fellow. That is the way with all 
the good talkers of our own time. Perhaps Mr. Bel- 
loc is too cyclonic and scornful for perfect conversa- 
tion, but his energy and wit are irresistible. I find 
Mr. Bernard Shaw far more tolerant and much less 
aggressive in conversation than on paper or on the 
platform. But the princes of the art, in my experi- 
ence, are Mr. Birrell, Lord Morley, and Mr. Richard 
Whiteing, the first for the rich wine of his humour, 
the second for the sensitiveness and delicacy of his 
thought, the third for the deep love of his kind that 
warms the generous current of his talk. I would add 
Mr. John Burns, but he is really a soloist. He is 
too interesting to himself to be sufficiently interested 
in others. When he is well under way you simply 
sit round and listen. It is capital amusement, but it 
is not conversation. 



68 ON TALK AND TALKERS 

It is not the man who talks abundantly who alone 
keeps the pot of conversation boiling. Some of the 
best talkers talk little. They save their shots for criti- 
cal moments and come in with sudden and devastating 
effect. Lamb had that art, and his stammer was the 
perfect vehicle of his brilliant sallies. Mr. Arnold 
Bennett in our time uses the same hesitation with de- 
lightful effect — sometimes with a shattering truthful- 
ness that seems to gain immensely from the prelimi- 
nary obstruction that has to be overcome. And I like 
in my company of talkers the good listener, the man 
who contributes an eloquent silence which envelops con- 
versation in an atmosphere of vigilant but friendly 
criticism. Addison had this quality of eloquent si- 
lence. Goldsmith, on the other hand, would have liked 
to shine, but had not the gift of talk. Among the 
eloquent listeners of our day I place that fine writer 
and critic, Mr. Robert Lynd, whose quiet has a cer- 
tain benignant graciousness, a tolerant yet vigilant 
watchfulness, that adds its flavour to the more eager 
talk of others. 

It was a favourite fancy of Samuel Rogers that 
"perhaps in the next world the use of words may be 
dispensed with — that our thoughts may stream into 
each other's minds without any verbal communication." 
It is an idea which has its attractions. It would save 
time and effort, and would preserve us from the mis- 
understandings which the clumsy instrument of speech 
involves. I think as I sit here in the orchard by the 
beehive and watch the bees carrying out their myriad 
functions with such disciplined certainty that there 



ON TALK AND TALKERS 69 

must be the possibility of mutual understanding with- 
out speech — an understanding such as that which 
Coleridge believed humanity would have discovered 
and exploited if it had been created mute. 

And yet I do not share Rogers's hope. I fancy 
the next world will be like this, only better. I think 
it will resound with the familiar speech of our earthly 
pilgrimage, and that in any shady walk or among any 
of the fields of asphodel over which we wander we 
may light upon the great talkers of history, and share 
in their eternal disputation. There, under some spread- 
ing oak or beech, I shall hope to see Carlyle and Tenny- 
son, or Lamb and Hazlitt and Coleridge, or Johnson 
laying down the law to Langton and Burke and Beau- 
clerk, with Bozzy taking notes, or Ben Jonson and 
Shakespeare continuing those combats of the Mermaid 
Tavern described by Fuller — the one mighty and lum- 
bering like a Spanish galleon, the other swift and 
supple of movement like an English frigate — or 
Chaucer and his Canterbury pilgrims still telling tales 
on an eternal May morning. It is a comfortable 
thought, but I cannot conceive it without the old, cheer- 
ful din of contending tongues. I fancy edging myself 
into those enchanted circles, and having a modest share 
in the glorious pow-wows of the masters. I hope they 
won't vote me a bore and scatter at my approach. 




ON A VISION OF EDEN 



I HAD a glimpse of Eden last night. It came, as visions 
should come, out of the misery of things. In all 
these tragic years no night spent in a newspaper office 
had been more depressing than this, with its sense of 
impending peril, its disquieting communique, Wyt- 
schaate lost, won, lost again; the eager study of the 
map with its ever retreating British line; the struggle 
to write cheerfully in spite of a sick and forboding 
heart — and then out into the night with the burden 
of it all hanging like a blight upon the soul. And as 
I stood in the dark and the slush and the snow by the 
Law Courts I saw careering towards me a motor-bus 
with great head-lights that shone like blast furnaces on 
a dark hillside. It seemed to me like a magic bus 
pounding through the gloom with good tidings, jolly 
tidings, and scattering the darkness with its jovial 

70 



ON A VISION OF EDEN 71 

lamps. Heavens, thought I, what strangers we are to 
good tidings; but here surely they come, breathless and 
radiant, for such a glow never sat on the brow of fear. 
The bus stopped and I got inside, and inside it was 
radiant too — so brilliant that you could not only see 
that your fellow-passengers were real people of flesh 
and blood and not mere phantoms in the darkness, but 
that you could read the paper with luxurious ease. 

But I did not read the paper. I didn't want to 
read the paper. I only wanted just to sit back and 
enjoy the forgotten sensation of a well-lit bus. It was 
as though at one stride I had passed out of the long 
and bitter night of the black years into the careless past, 
or forward into the future when all the agony would 
be a tale that was told. One day, I said to myself, we 
shall think nothing of a bus like this. All the buses 
will be like this, and we shall go galumphing home at 
midnight through streets as bright as day. The gloom 
will have vanished from Trafalgar Square and the 
fairyland of Piccadilly Circus will glitter once more 
with ten thousand lights singing the praises of Oxo and 
Bovril and Somebody's cigarettes and Somebody else's 
pills. We shall look up at the stars and not fear them 
and at the moon and not be afraid. The newspaper 
will no longer be a chronicle of hell, nor slaughter 
the tyrannical occupation of our thoughts. 

And as I sat in the magic bus and saturated myself 
with this intoxicating vision of the Eden that will 
come when the madness is past, I wondered what I 
should do on entering that blessed realm that was 
lost and that we yearn to regain. Yes, I think I 



72 ON A VISION OF EDEN 

should fall on my knees. I think we shall all want to 
fall on our knees. What other attitude will there 
be for us? Even my barber will fall on his knees. 
"If I thought peace was coming to-morrow," he said 
firmly the other day, "I'd fall on my knees this very 
night." He spoke as though nothing but peace would 
induce him to do such a desperate, unheard-of thing. 
I tried to puzzle out his scheme of faith, but found 
it beyond me. It rather resembled the naked com- 
mercialism of King Theebaw who when his favourite 
wife lay ill promised his gods most splendid gifts if she 
recovered, and when she died brought up a park of 
artillery and blew their temple down. But my bar- 
ber, nevertheless, had the root of the matter in him, 
and I would certainly follow his example. 

But then — what then? Well I should want to 
get on to some high and solitary place — alone, or 
with just one companion who knows when to be silent 
and when to talk — there to cleanse my soul of this 
debauch of horror. I would take the midnight train 
and ho! for Keswick. And in the dawn of a golden 
day — it must be a golden day — I would see the sun 

Flatter the mountain tops with sovran eye 

and set out by the lapping waves of Derwentwater 
for glorious Sty Head and hear the murmurs from 
Glaramara's inmost caves and scramble up Great Gable 
and over by Eskhause and Scafell and down into the 
green pastures of Langdale. And there in that sane- 



ON A VISION OF EDEN 73 

tuary with its starry dome and its encompassing hills 
I should find the thing I sought. -* 

Then, like the barber, I shall be moved to do some- 
thing desperate. I shall want some oblation to lay 
on the altar, and if I know my companion he will not 
have forgotten his hundred foot of rope or his craft 
of the mountains and together we will 

Leave our rags on Pavey Ark, 
Our cards on Pillar grim. 

And then, the consecration and the offering complete, 
back to the world that is shuddering, white-faced and 
wondering, into its Paradise Regained. . . . Why, 
here is St. John's Wood already. And Lord's! Of 
course I must have a day at Lord's. It will be a part 
of the ritual of reconciliation. The old players will 
not be there, for the gulf with the past is wide and 
the bones of many a great artist lie on distant fields. 
But we must recapture their music and pay homage 
to their memory. Yes, I will take my lunch to Lord's 
— or perchance the Oval — and sit in the sunshine and 
hear the merry tune of bat and ball, and walk over 
the greensward in the interval and look at the wicket, 
and talk for a whole day with my companion of the 
giants of old and of the doughty things we have seen 
them do. Haig and Hindenburg, Tirpitz and Jellicoe, 
all the names that have filled our nightmare shall be 
forgotten: there shall fall from our lips none but the 
names of the goodly game — "W. G." and Ranji, 
Johnny Briggs and Lohmann, Spofforth and Bonnor, 



74 ON A VISION OF EDEN 

Ulyett and Barnes (a brace of them) and all the jolly 
host. We'll not forget one of them. Not one. For 
a whole day we will go it, hammer and tongs. 

And there are ever so many more things I shall 
want to do. I shall want to go and see the chestnuts 
at Bushey Park on Chestnut Sunday. I shall want 
to send Christmas cards, and light bonfires on the 
Fifth, and make my young friends April fools on the 
First, and feel what a tennis racket is like, and have 
hot cross buns on Good Friday and pancakes on Shrove 
Tuesday. I shall want to go and sit on the sands and 
hear nigger minstrels again, and talk about the pros- 
pects of the Boat Race, and take up all the pleasant 
threads of life that fell from our hands nearly four 
years ago. In short, I shall plunge into all the old 
harmless gaieties that we have forgotten, have no time 
for, no heart for, no use for to-day. 

But the bus has stopped and I am turned out of 
Eden into the snow and the slush and the never- 
ending night. The magic chariot goes on with its 
blazing lights and a bend in the road quenches the 
pleasant vision in darkness. 





ON A COMIC GENIUS 

"Like to see Harry Lauder? Of course I should like 
to see Harry Lauder. But how can I decently go and 
see Harry Lauder with Lord Devonport putting us 
on rations, with every hoarding telling me that ex- 
travagance is a crime, and with Trafalgar Square 
aflame with commands to me to go to the bank or the 
post-office and put every copper I have, as well as 
every copper I can borrow, into the War Loan? Do 
you realise that the five shillings I should pay for a 
seat to see Harry Lauder would, according to the esti- 
mate of the placards on the walls, buy thirty-one and 
a half bullets to send to the Germans? Now, on a 
conservative estimate, those thirty-one and a half bul- 
lets ought to " 

"My dear fellow, Harry Lauder has subscribed 
£52,000 to the War Loan. In going to see him, there- 
fore, you are subscribing to the War Loan. You are 
making him your agent. You pass the cash on to him 
and he passes the bullets on to the Germans. It is a 
patriotic duty to go to see Harry Lauder." 

I fancy the reasoning was more ingenious than sound, 
but it seemed a good enough answer to the hoard- 

75 



76 ON A COMIC GENIUS 

ings, and I went. It was a poor setting for the great 
man — one of those dismal things called revues, that 
are neither comedies nor farces, nor anything but sham- 
bling, hugger-mugger contraptions into which you fling 
anything that comes handy, especially anything that is 
suggestive of night-clubs, fast young men and faster 
young women. I confess that I prefer my Harry with- 
out these accompaniments. I like him to have the 
stage to himself. I like Miss Ethel Levy to be some- 
where else when he is about. I do not want anything 
to come between me and the incomparable Harry any 
more than I want anyone to help me to appreciate the 
Fifth Symphony by beating time with his foot and 
humming the melody. 

And for the same reason. The Fifth Symphony or 
any other great work of art creates a state of mind, a 
spiritual atmosphere, that is destroyed by any intrusive 
and alien note. And it is this faculty of creating a 
state of feeling, an authentic atmosphere of his own, 
that is the characteristic of the art of Harry Lauder, 
and the secret of the extraordinary influence he exer- 
cises over his public. If you are susceptible to that in- 
fluence the entrance of the quaint figure in the Scotch 
cap, the kilt and the tartan gives you a sensation un- 
like anything else on the stage or in life. Like Bottom, 
you are translated. Your defences are carried by storm, 
your severities disperse like the mist before the sun, 
you are no longer the man the world knows; you are 
a boy, trooping out from Hamelin town with other 
boys to the piping of the magician. The burden has 
fallen off your back, the dark mountain has opened like 



ON A COMIC GENIUS 77 

a gateway into the realms of light and laughter, and 
you go through, dancing happy, to meet the sunshine. 

This atmosphere is not the result of conscious art 
or of acting in the professional sense. It would even 
be true to say that Harry Lauder is not an actor at 
all. Contrast him with the other great figure of the 
music-hall stage in this generation, Albert Chevalier, 
and you will understand what I mean. Chevalier is 
never himself, but always somebody else, and that some- 
body else is astonishingly real — an incomparable coster, 
a serio-comic decayed actor, a simple old man celebrat- 
ing the virtues of his "Old Dutch." With his great 
powers of observation and imitativeness he gives you 
a subtle study of a type. He is so much of an artist 
that his own personality never occurs to you. If Chev- 
alier came on as Chevalier you would not know him. 

But Harry Lauder is the most personal thing on 
the stage. You do not want him to imitate someone 
else: you want him to be just himself. It doesn't 
much matter what he does, and it doesn't much mat- 
ter how often you have seen him do it. In fact, the 
oftener you have seen him do it the better you like it. 
His jokes may be old, but they are never stale. They 
ripen and mellow with time; they are like old friends 
and old port that grow better with age. His songs 
may be simple and threadbare. You don't care. You 
just want him to go on singing them, singing about 
the bluebells in the dells and the bonnie lassie, and the 
heather-r, the bonnie pur-r-ple heather-r, and pausing 
to explain to you the thrifty terms on which he has 
bought "the ring." You want to see him walk, you 



78 ON A COMIC GENIUS 

want to see him skip — oh, the incomparable drollery 
of that demure little step! — you want to hear him 
talk, you want to hear him laugh. In short, you just 
want him to be there doing anything he likes and 
making you happy and idyllic and childlike and for- 
getful of all the burden and the mystery of this inex- 
plicable world. 

He has art, of course — great art; a tuneful voice; 
a rare gift of voice-production, every word coming 
full and true, and with a delicate sense of value; a 
shrewd understanding of the limits of his medium; 
a sly, dry humour which makes his simple rusticity 
the vehicle of a genial satire. And his figure and his 
face add to his equipment. His walk is priceless. 
His legs — oh, who shall describe those legs, those 
exiguous legs, so brief and yet so expressive? Clothed 
in his kilt and his tartan, he is grotesque and yet not 
grotesque, but whimsical, droll, a strange mixture of 
dignity and buffoonery. Your first impulse is to laugh 
at him, your next and enduring impulse is to laugh 
with him. You cannot help laughing with him if you 
have a laugh in you, for his laugh is irresistible. It is 
so friendly and companionable, so full of intimacies, so 
open and sunny. 

He comes to the footlights and talks, turns out his 
pockets and tells you the history of the contents, or 
gossips of the ways of sailors, and you gather round 
like children at a fair. The sense of the theatre has 
vanished. You are not listening to an actor, but to 
an old friend who is getting nearer and nearer to you 
all the time, until he seems to have got you by the but- 



ON A COMIC GENIUS 



79 



ton and to be telling his drolleries to you personally 
and chuckling in your own private ear. There is noth- 
ing comparable to this intimacy between the man and 
his audience. It is the triumph of a personality, so 
expansive, so rich in the humanities, so near to the 
general heart, that it seems a natural element, a sort of 
spirit of happiness, embodied and yet all pervasive. 

But perhaps you, sir, have not fallen under the 
spell. If so, be not scornful of us v/ho have. Be 
sorry for yourself. Believe me, you have missed one 
of the cheerful experiences of a rather drab world. 





ON A VANISHED GARDEN 



I WAS walking with a friend along the Spaniards Road 
the other evening, talking on the inexhaustible theme 
of these days, when he asked: "What is the biggest 
thing that has happened to this country as the out- 
come of the war?" 

"It is within two or three hundred yards from here," 
I replied. "Come this way and I'll show it to you." 

He seemed a little surprised, but accompanied me 
cheerfully enough as I turned from the road and led 
him through the gorse and the trees towards Parlia- 
ment Fields, until we came upon a large expanse of 
allotments, carved out of the great playground, and 
alive with figures, men, women, and children, some 
earthing up potatoes, some weeding onion beds, some 

80 



ON A VANISHED GARDEN 8i 

thinning out carrots, some merely walking along the 
patches and looking at the fruits of their labour spring- 
ing from the soil. "There," I said, "is the most im- 
portant result of the war." 

He laughed, but not contemptuously. He knew 
what I meant, and I think he more than half agreed. 

And I think you will agree, too, if you will consider 
what that stretch of allotments means. It is the symp- 
tom of the most important revival, the greatest spirit- 
ual awakening this country has seen for generations. 
Wherever you go that symptom meets you. Here in 
Hampstead allotments are as plentiful as blackberries 
in autumn. A friend of mine who lives in Beckenham 
tells me there are fifteen hundred in his parish. In the 
neighbourhood of London there must be many thou- 
sands. In the country as a whole there must be hun- 
dreds of thousands. If dear old Joseph Fels could 
revisit the glimpses of the moon and see what is hap- 
pening, see the vacant lots and waste spaces bursting 
into onion beds and potato patches, what joy would be 
his! He was the forerunner of the revival, the pas- 
sionate pilgrim of the Vacant Lot; but his hot gospel 
fell on deaf ears, and he died just before the trumpet 
of war awakened the sleeper. 

Do not suppose that the greatness of this thing that 
is happening can be measured in terms of food. That 
is important, but it is not the most important thing. 
The allotment movement will add appreciably to our 
food supplies, but it will add far more to the spiritual 
resources of the nation. It is the beginning of a war 
on the disease that is blighting our people. What is 



8a ON A VANISHED GARDEN 

wrong with us? What is the root of our social and 
spirtual ailment? Is it not the divorce of the people 
from the soil? For generations the wholesome red 
blood of the country has been sucked into the great 
towns, and we have seen grow up a vast machine of 
industry that has made slaves of us, shut out the light 
of the fields from our lives, left our children to grow 
like weeds in the slums, rootless and waterless, poisoned 
the healthy instincts of nature implanted in us, and put 
in their place the rank growths of the streets. Can 
you walk through a London working-class district or a 
Lancashire cotton town, with their huddle of airless 
streets, without a feeling of despair coming over you 
at the sense of this enormous perversion of life into the 
arid channels of death ? Can you take pride in an Em- 
pire on which the sun never sets when you think of 
the courts in which, as Will Crooks says, the sun never 
rises ? 

And now the sun is going to rise. We have started 
a revolution that will not end until the breath of 
the earth has come back to the soul of the people. 
The tyranny of the machine is going to be broken. 
The dead hand is going to be lifted from the land. 
Yes, you say, but these people that I see working on 
the allotments are not the people from the courts and 
the slums; but professional men, the superior artisan, 
and so on. That is true. But the movement must 
get hold of the intelligenzia first. The important thing 
is that the breach in the prison is made: the fresh air 
is filtering in; the idea is born — not still-born, but 



ON A VANISHED GARDEN 83 

born a living thing. It is a way of salvation that will 
not be lost, and that all will traverse. 

This is not mere dithyrambic enthusiasm. Take a 
man out of the street and put him in a garden, and 
you have made a new creature of him. I have seen 
the miracle again and again. I know a bus conductor, 
for example, outwardly the most ordinary of his kind. 
But one night I touched the key of his soul, mentioned 
allotments, and discovered that this man was going 
about his daily work irradiated by the thought of his 
garden triumphs. He had got a new purpose in life. 
He had got the spirit of the earth in his bones. It is 
not only the humanising influence of the garden, it is 
its democratising influence too. 

When Adam delved and Eve span, 
Where was then the gentleman? 

You can get on terms with anybody if you will discuss 
gardens. I know a distinguished public servant and 
scholar whose allotment is next to that of a bricklayer. 
They have become fast friends, and the bricklayer, be- 
ing the better man at the job, has unconsciously as- 
sumed the role of a kindly master encouraging a well- 
meaning but not very competent pupil. 

And think of the cleansing influence of all this. 
Light and air and labour — these are the medicines not 
of the body only, but of the soul. It is not ponderable 
things alone that are found in gardens, but the great 
wonder of life, the peace of nature, the influences of 
sunsets and seasons and of all the intangible things to 
which we can give no name, not because they are small. 



84 ON A VANISHED GARDEN 

but because they are outside the compass of our speech. 
In the great legend of the Fall, the spiritual disaster 
of Man is symbolised by his exclusion from a garden, 
and the moral tragedy of modern industrialism is only 
the repetition of that ancient fable. Man lost his 
garden and with it that tranquillity of soul that is 
found in gardens. He must find his way back to Eden 
if he is to recover his spiritual heritage, and though 
Eden is but a twenty-pole allotment in the midst of a 
hundred other twenty-pole allotments, he will find it 
as full of wonder and refreshment as the garden of 
Epicurus. He will not find much help from the God 
that Mr. Wells has discovered, or invented, but the 
God that dwells in gardens is sufficient for all our 
needs — let the theologians say what they will. 

Not God in gardens? When the eve is cool? 

Nay, but I have a sign — 

Tis very sure God walks in mine. 

No one who has been a child in a garden will doubt 
the sign, or lose its impress through all his days. I 
know, for I was once a child whose world was a gar- 
den. 

It lay a mile away from the little country town, 
shut out from the road by a noble hedge, so high that 
even Jim Berry, the giant coal-heaver, the wonder and 
the terror of my childhood, could not see over, so 
thick that no eye could peer through. It was a garden 
of plenty, but also a garden of the fancy, with neglected 
corners, rich in tangled growths and full of romantic 



ON A VANISHED GARDEN 85 

possibilities. It was in this wilder terrain that I had 
found the hedgehog, here, too, had seen the glow- 
worm's delicate light, and here, with my brain excited 
by "The Story of the Hundred Days," that I knew the 
Frenchmen lurked in ambush while I at the head of my 
gallant troop of the Black Watch was careering with 
magnificent courage across the open country where the 
potatoes and the rhubarb and the celery grew. 

It was ever the Black Watch. Something in the 
name thrilled me. And when one day I packed a 
little handbag with a nightgown and started out to 
the town where the railway station was it was to 
Scotland I was bound and the Black Watch in which 
I meant to enlist. It occurred to me on the road that 
I needed money and I returned gravely and asked my 
mother for half a crown. She was a practical woman 
and brought me back to the prose of things with 
arguments suitable to a very youthful mind. 

The side windows of the house commanded the 
whole length of the garden to where at the end stood 
the pump whence issued delicious ice-cold water 
brought up from a well so deep that you could imagine 
Australia to be not far from the bottom. 

If only I could get to Australia! I knew it lay 
there under my feet with people walking along head 
downwards and kangaroos hopping about with their 
young in their pockets. It was merely a question of 
digging to get there. I chose a sequestered corner and 
worked all a summer morning with a heavy spade in 
the fury of this high emprise, but I only got the length 



86 ON A VANISHED GARDEN 

of the spade on the journey and retired from the task 
with a sense of the bitter futility of life. 

Never was there a garden more rich in fruit. 
Around the western wall of the house was trained a 
noble pear tree that flung its arms with engaging con- 
fidence right up to my bedroom window. They were 
hard pears that ripened only in keeping, and at Christ- 
mas melted rich and luscious in the mouth. They were 
kept locked up in the tool shed, but love laughs at lock- 
smiths, and my brother found it possible to remove the 
lock without unlocking it by tearing out the whole 
staple from its socket. My father was greatly puz- 
zled by the tendency of the pears to diminish, but he 
was a kindly, unsuspecting man who made no dis- 
agreeable inquiries. 

Over the tool shed grew a grape vine. The roof 
of the shed was accessible by a filbert tree, the first 
of half a dozen that lined the garden on the side 
remote from the road. On sunny days there was no 
pleasanter place to lie than the top of the shed, with 
the grapes, small but pleasant to the thirsty palate, 
ripening thick around you. A point in favour of the 
spot was that it was visible from no window. One 
could lie there and eat the fruit without annoying in- 
terruptions. 

Equally retired was the little grass-grown path that 
branched off from the central gravelled path which 
divided the vegetable from the fruit garden. Here, 
by stooping down, one was hidden from prying eyes 
that looked from the windows by the thick rows of 
gooseberry bushes and raspberry canes that lined the 



ON A VANISHED GARDEN 87 

path. It was my favourite spot, for there grew a de- 
licious gooseberry that I counted above all gooseberries, 
small and hairy and yellow, with a delicate flavour 
that is as vivid to-day as if the forty years that lie 
between now and then were but a day. By this path, 
too, grew the greengage trees. With caution, one 
could safely sample the fruit, and at the worst one 
was sure to find some windfalls among the straw- 
berry beds beyond the gooseberry bushes. 

I loved that little grass-grown path for its seclusion 
as well as for its fruit. Here, with "Monte Cristo" 
or "Hereward the Wake," or "The Yellow Frigate," 
or a drawing-board, one could forget the tyrannies of 
school and all the buffets of the world. Here was the 
place to take one's griefs. Here it was that I wept 
hot tears at the news of Landseer's death — Landseer, 
the god of my young idolatry, whose dogs and horses, 
deer and birds I knew line by line through delighted 
imitation. It seemed on that day as though the sun 
had gone out of the heavens, as though the pillars of 
the firmament had suddenly given way. Landseer 
dead ! What then was the worth of living? But the wave 
of grief passed. I realised that the path was now clear 
before me. While Landseer lived I was cribbed, cab- 
ined, confined; but now My eyes cleared as I 

surveyed the magnificent horizon opening out before 
me. I must have room to live with this revelation. 
The garden was too narrow for such limitless thoughts 
to breathe in. I stole from the gate that led to the 
road by the pump and sought the wide meadows and 
the riverside to look this vast business squarely in the 



88 ON A VANISHED GARDEN 

face. And for days the great secret of my future that 
I carried with me made the burden of a dull, unap- 
preciative world light. Little did those who treated 
me as an ordinary idle boy know. Little did my elder 
brother, who ruled me with a rod of iron, realise that 
one day, when I was knighted and my pictures hung 
thick on the Academy walls, he would regret his harsh 
treatment ! 

But to return to the garden. The egg-plum tree 
had no favour in my sight. Its position was too open 
and palpable. And indeed I cared not for the fruit. 
It was too large and fleshy for my taste. But the ap- 
ple trees! These were the chief glory of the garden. 
Winter apple trees with fruit that ripened in secret; 
paysin trees with fruit that ripened on the branches, 
fruit small with rich crimson splashes on the dark 
green ground; hawthorndean trees with fruit large 
yellow-green into which the teeth crunched with crisp 
and juicy joy. There was one hawthorndean most 
thoughtfully situated behind the tool shed. And near 
by stood some props providentially placed there for 
domestic purposes. They were the keys with which 
I unlocked the treasure house. 

A large quince tree grew on the other side of the 
hedge at the end of the garden. It threw its arms 
in a generous, neighbourly way over the hedge, and 
I knew its austere fruit well. Some of it came to me 
from its owner, an ancient man, "old Mr. Lake," who 
on summer days used to toss me largess from his abun- 
dance. The odour of a quince always brings back to 




Whose tassels the bold militiamen. . . . would gaily pluck 
as they passed. 



90 ON A VANISHED GARDEN 

me the memory of a sunny garden and a little old man 
over the hedge crying, "Here, my boy, catch!" 

I have said nothing of that side of the garden 
where the vegetables grew. It was dull prose, re- 
lieved only by an occasional apple tree. The flowers 
in the fruit garden and by the paths were old-fashioned 
favourites, wallflowers and mignonette, stocks and 
roses. And over the garden gate grew a spreading 
lilac whose tassels the bold militiamen, who camped not 
far away, would gaily pluck as they passed on the 
bright May days. I did not resent it. I was proud 
that these brave fellows in their red coats should levy 
tribute on our garden. It seemed somehow to link 
me up with the romance of war. By the kitchen door 
grew an elderberry tree, whose heavy and unpleasant 
odour was borne for the sake of the coming winter 
nights, when around the fire we sat with our hot el- 
derberry wine and dipped our toast into the rich, 
steaming product of that odorous tree — nights when 
the winter apples came out from the chest, no longer 
hard and sour, but mellow and luscious as a King 
William pear in August, and when out in the garden 
all was dark and mysterious, gaunt trees standing out 
against the sky, where in the far distance a thin lumi- 
nance told of the vast city beneath. 

I passed by the old road recently, and sought the 
garden of my childhood. I sought in vain. A big 
factory had come into the little town, and workmen's 
dwellings had sprung up in its train. Where the 
garden had been there was now a school surrounded 
by cottages, and children played on the doorsteps or 



ON A VANISHED GARDEN 



91 



in the little back yards, which looked on to other 
little back yards and cottages beyond. My garden 
with its noble hedge and its solitude, its companion- 
able trees and grass-grown paths, had vanished. It 
was the garden of a dream. 





ALL ABOUT A DOG 



It was a bitterly cold night, and even at the far end 
of the bus the east wind that raved along the street 
cut like a knife. The bus stopped, and two women 
and a man got in together and filled the vacant places. 
The younger woman was dressed in sealskin, and car- 
ried one of those little Pekinese dogs that women in 
sealskin like to carry in their laps. The conductor 
came in and took the fares. Then his eye rested with 
cold malice on the beady-eyed toy dog. I saw trouble 
brewing. This was the opportunity for which he had 
been waiting, and he intended to make the most of it. 
I had marked him as the type of what Mr. Wells has 
called the Resentful Employe, the man with a gen- 
eral vague grievance against everything and a particular 
grievance against passengers who came and sat in his 
bus while he shivered at the door. 

"You must take that dog out," he said with sour 
venom. 

"I shall certainly do nothing of the kind. You can 
take my name and address," said the woman, who 

92 



ALL ABOUT A DOG 93 

had evidently expected the challenge and knew the 
reply. 

"You must take that dog out — that's my orders." 
"I won't go on the top in such weather. It would 
kill me," said the woman. 

"Certainly not," said her lady companion. "You've 
got a cough as it is." 

"It's nonsense," said her male companion. 
The conductor pulled the bell and the bus stopped. 
"This bus doesn't go on until that dog is brought 
out." And he stepped on to the pavement and waited. 
It was his moment of triumph. He had the law on 
his side and a whole busful of angry people under the 
harrow. His embittered soul was having a real holi- 
day. 

The storm inside rose high. "Shameful" ; "He's no 
better than a German" ; "Why isn't he in the Army?" ; 
"Call the police"; "Let's all report him"; "Let's make 
him give us our fares back" ; "Yes, that's it, let's make 
him give us our fares back." For everybody was on 
the side of the lady and the dog. 

That little animal sat blinking at the dim lights in 
happy unconsciousness of the rumpus of which he was 
the cause. 

The conductor came to the door. "What's your 
number?" said one, taking out a pocket-book with a 
gesture of terrible things. "There's my number," said 
the conductor imperturbably. "Give us our fares back 
— ^you've engaged to carry us — you can't leave us here 
all night." "No fares back," said the conductor. 
Two or three passengers got out and disappeared 



94 ALL ABOUT A DOG 

into the night. The conductor took another turn on 
the pavement, then went and had a talk with the 
driver. Another bus, the last on the road, sailed by 
indifferent to the shouts of the passengers to stop. 
"They stick by each other — the villains," was the 
comment. 

Someone pulled the bell violently. That brought 
the driver round to the door. "Who's conductor of 
this bus ?" he said, and paused for a reply. None com- 
ing, he returned to his seat and resumed beating his 
arms across his chest. There was no hope in that quar- 
ter. A policeman strolled up and looked in at the 
door. An avalanche of indignant protests and appeals 
burst on him. "Well, he's got his rules, you know," 
he said genially. "Give your name and address." 
"That's what he's been offered, and he won't take 
it." "Oh," said the policeman, and he went away and 
took his stand a few yards down the street, where he 
was joined by two more constables. 

And still the little dog blinked at the lights, and 
the conductor walked to and fro on the pavement, like 
a captain on the quarter-deck in the hour of victory. A 
young woman, whose voice had risen high above the 
gale inside, descended on him with an air of threaten- 
ing and slaughter. He was immovable — as cold as the 
night and hard as the pavement. She passed on in a 
fury of impotence to the three policemen, who stood 
like a group of statuary up the street watching the 
drama. Then she came back, imperiously beckoned to 
her "young man" who had sat a silent witness of her 
rage, and vanished. Others followed. The bus was 



ALL ABOUT A DOG 95 

emptying. Even the dashing young fellow who had 
demanded the number, and who had declared he would 
see this thing through if he sat there all night, had 
taken an opportunity to slip away. 

Meanwhile the Pekinese party were passing through 
every stage of resistance to abject surrender. "I'll 
go on the top," said the sealskin lady at last. "You 
mustn't." "I will." "You'll have pneumonia." "Let 
me take it." (This from the man.) "Certainly not" 
— she would die with her dog. When she had disap- 
peared up the stairs, the conductor came back, pulled 
the bell, and the bus went on. He stood sourly tri- 
umphant while his conduct was savagely discussed in 
his face by the remnant of the party. 

Then the engine struck work, and the conductor 
went to the help of the driver. It was a long job, 
and presently the lady with the dog stole down the 
stairs and re-entered the bus. When the engine was 
put right the conductor came back and pulled the bell. 
Then his eye fell on the dog, and his hand went to the 
bell-rope again. The driver looked round, the con- 
ductor pointed to the dog, the bus stopped, and the 
struggle recommenced with all the original features, 
the conductor walking the pavement, the driver smack- 
ing his arm on the box, the little dog blinking at the 
lights, the sealskin lady declaring that she would not 
go on the top — and finally going. . , . 

"I've got my rules," said the conductor to me when 
I was the last passenger left behind. He had won his 
victory, but felt that he would like to justify himself 
to somebody. 



96 ALL ABOUT A DOG 

"Rules," I said, "are necessary things, but there are 
rules and rules. Some are hard and fast rules, like 
the rule of the road, which cannot be broken without 
danger to life and limb. But some are only rules for 
your guidance, which you can apply or wink at, as 
common sense dictates — like that rule about the dogs. 
They are not a whip put in your hand to scourge your 
passengers with, but an authority for an emergency. 
They are meant to be observed in the spirit, not in 
the letter — for the comfort and not the discomfort of 
the passengers. You have kept the rule and broken its 
spirit. You want to mix your rules with a little good- 
will and good temper." 

He took it very well, and when I got of? the bus he 
said "Good night" quite amiably. 





ON THE AMERICAN SOLDIER 



I HOPE the young American soldier, with whom we 
are becoming so familiar in the street, the tube and 
the omnibus, has found us as agreeable as we have 
found him. We were not quite sure whether we 
should like him, but the verdict is very decisively in 
the affirmative. It has been my fortune to know many 
Americans in the past, but they were for the most part 
selected Americans, elderly persons, statesmen, writers, 
diplomatists, journalists, and so on. Not having been 
in America I had not realised what the plain, average 
citizen, especially the young citizen, was like. Now 
he is here walking our streets and rubbing shoulders 
with us in sufficient numbers for a general impression 
to be taken. It is a pleasant impression. I like the 
air of plenty that he carries with him, the well-nour- 
ished body, the sense of ease with himself and the 
world, the fund of good nature that he seems to have 
at command, the frankness of bearing, and, what was 
least expected, the touch of self-conscious modesty that 
is rarely absent. 

If I may say so without offending him, he seems 
extraordinarily English. Physically he is rather bulkier 

97 



98 ON THE AMERICAN SOLDIER 

than the average English youth, and his accent dis- 
tinguishes him; but these differences only serve to 
sharpen the impression that he is one of ourselves who 
has been away somewhere — in a civilised land, where 
the larder is full, the schools plenty, and the family 
life homely and cordial. It is very rare that you see 
what you would call a foreign face in the uniform. 
This is singular in view of the mighty stream of im- 
migration from Continental countries that has been 
flowing for three-quarters of a century into the melt- 
ing pot of the United States; but I do not think the 
fact can be doubted. The blood is more mixed than 
ours, but the main current is emphatically British. 

Perhaps the difference that is observable could be 
expressed by saying that the American is not so much 
reminiscent of ourselves as of our forebears. He sug- 
gests a former generation rather than this. We have 
grown sophisticated, urban, and cynical; he still has 
the note of the country and of the older fashions that 
persist in the country. Lowell long ago pointed out 
that many of the phrases which we regarded as Amer- 
ican slang were good old East Anglian words which 
had been taken out by the early settlers in New Eng- 
land and persisted there after they had been forgotten 
by us. And in the same way the moral tone of the 
American to-day is like an echo from our past. He 
preserves the fervour for ideals which we seem to have 
lost. There is something of the revivalist in him, some- 
thing elemental and primitive that responds to a moral 
appeal. 

It is this abiding strain of English Puritanism which 



ON THE AMERICAN SOLDIER 99 

is responsible for the tidal wave of temperance that 
has swept the United States, Already nearly half the 
States have gone "bone dry," and it is calculated that, 
perhaps in two years, certainly in five, with the pres- 
ent temper in being, the whole of the Union will have 
banished the liquor traffic. A moral phenomenon of 
this sort might have been possible in the England of 
two or three generations ago; it is unthinkable in the 
moral atmosphere of to-day. The industrial machine 
has dried up the spring of moral enthusiasm. It will 
only return by a new way of life. Perhaps the new 
way of life is beginning in the allotment movement 
which is restoring to us the primal sanities of nature. 
We may find salvation in digging. 

It is sometimes said that the American is crude. It 
would be truer to say that he is young. He has not 
suffered the disenchantment of an old and thoroughly 
exploited society. We have the qualities of a middle- 
aged people who have lost our visions and are rather 
ashamed to be reminded that we ever had any. But a 
youthful ardour and buoyancy is the note of the Amer- 
ican. He may think too much in the terms of dollars, 
but he has freshness and vitality, faith in himself, a 
boyish belief in his future and a boyish zest in living. 
His good temper is inexhaustible, and he has the easy- 
going manner of one who has plenty of time and 
plenty of elbow-room in the world. 

For contrary to the common conception of him as 
a hurrying, bustling, get-on-or-get-out young man, he 
is leisurely both in speech and action, cool and un- 
worried, equable of mood, little subject to the ex- 



loo ON THE AMERICAN SOLDIER 

tremes of emotion, bearing himself with a solid de- 
liberateness that suggests confidence in himself and in- 
spires confidence in him. You feel that he will neither 
surprise you, nor let you down. 

Not the least noticeable of his qualities is his ac- 
cessibility. The common language, of course, is a great 
help, and the common traditions also. You are rarely 
quite at home with a man who thinks in another lan- 
guage than your own. The Tower of Babel was a 
great misfortune for humanity. But it is not these 
things which give the American his quality of imme- 
diate and easy intercourse. There is no ice to break 
before you get at him. There is no baffling atmosphere 
of doubt and hesitancy to get through ; no fencing nec- 
essary to find out on what social footing you are to 
stand. You are on him at once — or rather he is on 
you. He comes out into the open, without reserves of 
manner, and talks "right ahead" with the candour and 
ease of a man who is at home in the world and at home 
with you. He is free alike from intellectual priggish- 
ness and social aloofness. He is just a plain man talk- 
ing to a plain man on equal terms. 

It is the manner of the New World and of a demo- 
cratic society in which the Chief of the State is plain 
Mr. President, who may be the ruler of a continent 
this year and may go back to his business as a private 
citizen next year. It is illustrated by the tribute which 
Frederick Douglass, the negro preacher, paid to Lin- 
coln. "He treated me as a man," said Douglass after 
his visit to the President. "He did not let me feel 
for a moment that there was any difference in the 



ON THE AMERICAN SOLDIER loi 

colour of our skins." It is a fine testimony, but I do 
not suppose that Lincoln had to make any effort to 
achieve such a triumph of good manners. He treated 
Douglass as a man and an equal because he was a man 
and an equal, and because the difference in the colour 
of their skins had no more to do with their essential 
relationship than the difference in the colour of their 
ties or the shape of their boots. 

The directness and naturalness of the American is 
the most enviable of his traits. It gives the sense of 
a man who is born free — free from the irritating re- 
straints, embarrassments and artificialities of a society 
in which social caste and feudal considerations prevail 
as they still prevail in most European countries. Per- 
haps Germany is the most flagrant example. It used 
to be said by Goethe that there were twenty-seven dif- 
ferent social castes in Germany and that none of them 
would speak to the caste below. And Mr. Gerard's 
description of the Rat system suggests that the strati- 
fication of society has increased rather than dimin- 
ished since the days of Goethe. 

The disease is not so bad in this country; but we 
cannot pretend that we have the pure milk of democ- 
racy. No people which tolerates titles, and so de- 
liberately sets up social discriminations in its midst and 
false idols for its worship, can hope for the free, un- 
obstructed intercourse of a real democracy like that of 
America. It was said long ago by Daniel O'Connell 
that "the Englishman has all the qualities of a poker 
except its occasional warmth." It is a caricature, of 
course, but there is truth in it. We are icy because 



I02 ON THE AMERICAN SOLDIER 

we are uncertain about each other — not about each 
other as human beings, but about each other's social 
status. We have got the spirit of feudalism still in 
our bones, and our public school system, our titles, and 
our established Church system all tend to keep it alive, 
all vi^ork to cut up society into social orders w^hich 
are the negation of democracy. 

And as if we had not enough of the abomination, 
we are imitating the German Rat system with the 
grotesque O.B.E. We shall get stiffer than ever under 
this rain of sham jewelry, and shall not be fit to speak 
to our American friends. But we shall still be able 
to admire and envy the fine freedom and human 
friendliness which is the conspicuous gift of these stal- 
wart young fellows who walk our streets in their flat- 
brimmed hats. 

Perhaps when the account of the war is made up 
we shall find that the biggest credit entry of all is* 
this fact that they did walk our streets as comrades 
of our own sons. For over a century we two peoples, 
talking the same language and cherishing the same 
traditions of liberty, have walked on opposite sides of 
the way, remembering old grudges, forgetting our 
common heritage, forgetting even that we gave the 
world its first and its grandest lead in peace by pro- 
claiming the disarmament of the Canadian-United 
States frontier. Now that the grudges are forgotten 
and we have found a reconciliation that will never 
again be broken and that will be the corner stone of 
the new world order that is taking shape in the furnace 
of these days. 




'APPY 'EINRICH 



The waiter certainly was rather slow, or perhaps it 
was that we were hungry and impatient. In any case, 
I apologised to my guest, a young fellow home on 
leave, and explained that the waiter was entitled to be 
a little absent-minded, for he had lost two sons in 
the war and his only remaining son had been invalided 
out of the Army, a permanent wreck. 

"He tells me," I said, "that the boy never talks 
about the war or his experiences. He just seems silent 
and numbed. All that they know is that he killed 
five Germans, and that he is sorry for one of them. 

103 



I04 'APPY 'EINRICH 

It happened while he was on patrol. There had been 
a good deal of indignation at that part of the line 
because there had been cases reported in which 'hands 
up' had been a trick for ensnaring some of our men, 
and the order had been given that the signal was to 
be ignored and those making it shot at sight. It was 
twilight and a young German soldier was seen run- 
ning forward with his hands up. The patrol fired and 
he fell. He was quite unarmed and alone. On his 
body they found letters from his sweetheart in England 
— old letters that he had apparently carried with him 
all through the war. They showed that he had been 
at work at some place in London and had been en- 
gaged to be married when the war broke out." 

"Yes," said my companion, as the waiter came up 
with the fish. "Yes, when the enemy turns from an 
abstraction to an individual you generally find there's 
something that makes you hate this killing business. 
I don't know that I have felt more sorry for any 
man's death in this war than for that of a German. 

"You've been to F , haven't you? You know 

that bit of line north of the M road that you 

reach by the communication trench that is always up 
to your knees in mud no matter how dry the weather 
is. You remember how close the lines are to each other 
at that point — not forty yards apart? I was there in 
a dull season." 

"You were lucky," I said. "It isn't often dull 
there." 

"No, but it was then. The Boche would drop over 
an occasional whiz-bang as a reminder, and he'd have 



'APPY 'EINRICH 105 

his usual afternoon cock-shy over our heads at the last 
pinnacle standing on the ruins of the cathedral in the 
town behind us. But really there was nothing doing, 
and we got rather chummy with the fellows over the 
way. We'd put up a target for them, and they'd do 
the same for us. They'd got some decent singers 
among them, and we'd shout for the 'Hate' song or 
'Wacht am Rhein' or 'Tannenbaum' or something of 
that sort and they always obliged, and we gave them 
the best we had back. 

"Yes, we got quite friendly, and one morning one 
of their men got up on the parapet over the way, 
bowed very low, and shouted 'Goot morning.' Our 
men answered, 'Morgen, Fritz. How goes it?' and so 
on. He was a big, fat fellow, with glasses, and a 
good-humoured face, and to our great joy he began to 
sing a song in broken English. And after he had fin- 
ished we called for more and he gave us more. He 
had a real gift for comedy; seemed one of those fel- 
lows who are sent into the world with their happi- 
ness ready made. He laughed a great gurgling laugh 
that made you laugh to hear it. Our chaps gave him 
no end of applause, and called for his name. He 
beamed and bowed, said 'Thank you, genteelmen,' and 
said that his name was Heinrich something or other. 

"So we called him ' 'Appy 'Einrich,' and whenever 
our men were bored and things had gone to sleep 
someone would sing out 'We want 'Einrich. Send 
us 'Appy 'Einrich to give us a song.' And up would 
come Heinrich on to the parapet, red and smiling and 
bowing like a prima donna. And off he would start 



io6 'APPY 'EINRICH 

with his programme. He always seemed willing and 
evidently greatly enjoyed his popularity with our fel- 
lows. 

"This went on for some time, and then one day 
we got news that we were to be relieved at once. We 
were to clear out that night and our place was to be 
taken by "a Scotch regiment. You need not be told 
that we were glad. Life in the trenches when there 
is nothing doing is about as deadly a weariness as man 
has invented. We got our kit together and when night 
fell and our relief had come we marched back under 
the stars through F towards B . 

"We had been too much occupied with the pros- 
pect of release to give a thought to the fellows over 
the road or to Heinrich. I remembered him after- 
wards and hoped that someone had told the new men 
that Heinrich was a good sort and would always give 
them a bit of fun, if he was asked, or even if he wasn't 
asked. 

"Some weeks afterwards at B I ran across a 

man in the Scotch regiment which had followed us in 

the trenches on the M road, and we talked about 

things there. 'And how did you get on with Hein- 
rich?' I asked. 'Heinrich?' he said, 'who is he?' 
'Why, surely,' said I, 'you know Heinrich, the fat 
fellow across the way, who gets up on the parapet and 
says "Goot morning," and sings comic songs?' 'Never 
heard of him,' he said. 'Ah,' I said, 'he would have 
heard we were relieved and didn't find you so respon- 
sive a crowd as we were.' 'Never heard of him,' he 
repeated — then, after a pause, he added, 'There was an 



'APPY 'EINRICH 



107 



incident the morning after we took over the line. Some 
of our fellows saw a bulky Boche climbing on to the 
parapet just across the way and had a little target prac- 
tice, and he went down in a heap.' 'That was him,' I 
said, 'that was 'Appy 'Einrich. What a beastly busi- 
ness war is, and what ungrateful beggars we were to 
forget him!' 

"Yes, a beastly business, killing men," he added. "I 
don't wonder the waiter's son doesn't want to talk 
about it. We shall all be glad to forget when we 
come out of hell." 





ON FEAR 



I AM disposed to agree with Captain Dolbey that the 
man who knows no fear exists only in the imagination 
of the lady novelist or those who fight their battles 
at the base. He is invented because these naive peo- 
ple suppose that a hero who is conscious of fear ceases 
to be a hero. But the truth surely is that there would 
be no merit in being brave if you had no fear. The 
real victory of the hero is not over outward circum- 
stance, but over himself. One of the bravest men 
of our time is a man who was born timid and nervous 
and suffered tortures of apprenhension, and who set 
himself to the deliberate conquest of his fears by chal- 
lenging every danger that crossed his path and even 
going out of his way to meet the things he dreaded. ^ 
By sheer will he beat down the enemy within, and to 
the external world he seemed like a man who knew no 
fear. But the very essence of his heroism was that he 
had fought fear and won. 

io8 



ON FEAR 109 

It is time we got rid of the notion that there is 
anything discreditable in knowing fear. You might 
as well say that there is something discreditable in 
being tempted to tell a falsehood. The virtue is not 
in having no temptation to lie, but in being tempted 
to lie and yet telling the truth. And the more you are 
tempted the more splendid is the resistance. Without 
temptation you may make a plaster saint, but not a 
human hero. That is why the familiar story of Nel- 
son when a boy — "Fear! grandmother. I never saw 
fear. What is it?" — is so essentially false. Nelson 
did some of the bravest things ever done by man. They 
were brave to the brink of recklessness. The whole 
episode of the battle of Copenhagen was a breathless 
challenge to all the dictates of prudence. On the 
facts one would be compelled to admit that it was an 
act of uncalculating recklessness, except for one inci- 
dent which flashes a sudden light on the mind of Nel- 
son and reveals his astonishing command of himself and 
of circumstance. When the issue was trembling in the 
balance and every moment lost might mean dis- 
aster, he prepared his audacious message of terms 
to the Crown Prince ashore. It was a magnificent 
piece of what, in these days, we should call camou- 
flage. When he had written it, a wafer was given him, 
but he ordered a candle to be brought from the cock- 
pit and sealed the letter with wax, affixing a larger 
seal than he ordinarily used. "This," said he, "is no 
time to appear hurried and informal." With such 
triumphant self-possession could he trample on fear 
when he had a great end in view. But when there 



no ON FEAR 

was nothing at stake he could be as fearful as any- 
body, as in the accident to his carriage, recorded, I 
think, in Southey's "Life of Nelson." 

That incident of young Swinburne's climb of Culver 
Cliff, in the Isle of Wight, expresses the common-sense 
of the matter very well. At the age of seventeen he 
wanted to be a cavalry officer, and he decided to climb 
Culver Cliff, which was believed to be impregnable, 
"as a chance of testing my nerve in the face of death 
which could not be surpassed." He performed the 
feat, and then confessed his hardihood to his mother. 

"Of course," he said, "she wanted to know why 
I had done such a thing, and when I told her she 
laughed a short, sweet laugh, most satisfactory to the 
young ear, and said, 'Nobody ever thought you were 
a coward, my boy.' I said that was all very well, but 
how could I tell till I tried? 'But you won't do it 
again?' she said. I replied, 'Of course not — where 
would be the fun ?' " 

It was not that he had no fear; it was that he 
wanted to convince himself that he was able to master 
his fear when the emergency came. Having discov- 
ered that he had fear under his control there was 
no sense in taking risks for the mere sake of taking 
them. 

Most fears are purely subjective, the phantoms of a 
too vivid mind. I was looking over a deserted house 
situated in large grounds in the country the other day. 
It had been empty since the beginning of the war. 
Up to then it had been occupied by a man in the ship- 
ping trade. On the day that war was declared he 



ON FEAR III 

rushed into the house and cried, "We have declared 
war on Germany, I am ruined." Then he went out 
and shot himself. Had his mind been disciplined against 
panic he would have mastered his fears, and would 
have discovered that he had the luck to be in a trade 
which has benefited by the war more, perhaps, than 
any other. 

In this case it was the sudden Impact of fear that 
overthrew reason from its balance, but in other cases 
fear is a maggot in the brain that grows by brooding. 
There is a story of Maupassant's, which illustrates how 
a man who is not a coward may literally die of fright, 
by dwelling upon fear. He had resented the conduct 
of a man in a restaurant, who had stared insolently 
at a lady who was with him. His action led to a 
challenge from the offender, and an arrangement to 
meet next morning. When he got home, instead of 
going to bed, he began to wonder who his foe was, 
to hunt for his name in directories, to recall the cold 
assurance of his challenge, and to invest him with all 
sorts of terrors as a marksman. As the night ad- 
vanced he passed through all the stages from anxious 
curiosity to panic, and when his valet called him at 
dawn he found a corpse. Like the shipowner, he had 
shot himself to escape the terrors of his mind. 

It is the imaginative people who suffer most from 
fear. Give them only a hint of peril, and their minds 
will explore the whole circumference of disastrous con- 
sequences. It is not a bad thing in this world to be 
born a little dull and unimaginative. You will have 
a much more comfortable time. And if you have not 



112 



ON FEAR 



taken that precaution, you will do well to have a 
prosaic person handy to correct your fantasies. Therein 
Don Quixote showed his wisdom. In the romantic 
theatre of his mind perils rose like giants on every 
horizon ; but there was always Sancho Panza on his 
donkey, ready to prick the bubbles of his master with 
the broadsword of his incomparable stupidity. 





ON BEING CALLED THOMPSON 



Among my letters this morning was one which an- 
noyed me, not by its contents, but by its address. 
My name (for the purposes of this article) is Thomson, 
but my correspondent addressed me as Thompson. 
Now I confess I am a little sensitive about that "p." 
When I see it wedged in the middle of my name I 
am conscious of an annoyance altogether dispro- 
portioned to the fact. I know that taken in the 
lump the Thompsons are as good as the Thomsons. 
There is not a pin to choose between us. In the 
beginning we were all sons of some Thomas or other, 
and as surnames began to develop this man called 
himself Thomson and that man called himself Thomp- 
son. Why he should have spatchcocked a "p" into 
his name I don't know. I daresay it was pride on 
his part, just as it is my pride not to have a "p." 

"3 



114 ON BEING CALLED THOMPSON 

Or perhaps the explanation is that offered by 
Fielding, the novelist. He belonged to a branch of 
the Earl of Denbigh's family, but the Denbighs 
spelt their family name Feilding. When the novelist 
vv^as asked to explain the difference betvi^een the 
rendering of his name and theirs, he replied: "I 
suppose they don't know how to spell." That is 
probably the case of the Thompsons. They don't 
know how to spell. 

But whatever the origin of these variations we 
are attached to our own forms with obstinate pride. 
We feel an outrage on our names as if it were an out- 
rage on our persons. It was such an outrage that led 
to one of Stevenson's most angry outbursts. Some 
American publisher had pirated one of his books. 
But it was not the theft that angered him so much 
as the misspelling of his name. "I saw my book 
advertised as the work of R. L. Stephenson," he says, 
"and I own I boiled. It is so easy to know the 
name of a man whose book you have stolen, for there 
it is full length on the title page of your booty. But 
no, damn him, not he! He calls me Stephenson." 
I am grateful to Stevenson for that word. It ex- 
presses my feelings about the fellow who calls me 
Thompson. Thompson, indeed! 

I feel at this moment almost a touch of sympathy 
with that snob. Sir Frederic Thesiger, the uncle of 
the first Lord Chelmsford. He was addressed one 
day as "Mr. Smith," and the blood of all the Thesigers 
(whoever they may have been) boiled within him. 
"Do I look like a person of the name of Smith?" 



ON BEING CALLED THOMPSON 115 

he asked scornfully, and passed on. And as the 
blood of all the Thomsons boils within me I ask, 
"Do I look like a person of the name of Thompson? 
Now do I?" And yet I suppose one may fall as 
much in love with the name of Smith as with the 
name of Thesiger, if it happens to be one's own. I 
should like to try the experiment on Sir F. E. Smith. 
I should like to address him as Sir Frederic Thesiger 
and see how the blood of all the Smiths would take it. 

It is, I suppose, the feeling of the loss of our identity 
that annoys us when people play tricks with our 
names. We want to be ourselves and not somebody 
else. We don't want to be cut off from our ancestry 
and the fathers that begat us. We may not know 
much about our ancestors, and may not care much 
about them. Most of us, I suppose, are in the posi- 
tion of Sydney Smith. "I found my neighbours," 
he said, "were looking up their family tree, and I 
thought I would do the same, but I only got as far 
back as my great-grandfather, who disappeared some- 
where about the time of the Assizes/' If we go far 
enough back we shall all find ancestors who disappeared 
about the time of the Assizes, or, still worse, ought 
to have disappeared and didn't. But, such as they 
are, we belong to them, and don't want to be con- 
founded with those fellows, the Thompsons. 

And there is another reason for the annoyance. 
To misspell a man's name is to imply that he is so 
obscure and so negligible that you do not know how 
to address him and that you think so meanly of him 
that you need not trouble to find out. It is to offer 



ii6 ON BEING CALLED THOMPSON 

him the subtlest of all insults — especially if he is 
a Scotsman. The old prides and hatreds of the clans 
still linger in the forms of the Scotch names, and I 
believe you may make a mortal enemy of, let us say, 
Mr. Macdonald by calling him Mr. M'Donald or vice 
versa. Indeed, I recall the case of a malignant 
Scotch journalist vi^ho used systematically to spell 
a political opponent's name M'Intosh instead of 
Mackintosh because he knew it made him "boil," 
as Stephenson made R. L. S. boil or as Thompson 
makes me boil. 

Nor is this reverence for our name a contemptible 
vanity. I like a man who stands by his name and 
distrust the man who buys, borrows, or steals another. 
I have never thought so well of Bishop Percy, the 
author of "Percy's Reliques," since I discovered that 
his real name was Piercy, and that, being the son of 
a grocer, he knocked his "i" out when he went into 
the Church in order to set up a claim to belong to 
the house of the Duke of Northumberland. He even 
put the Percy arms on his monument in Dromore 
Cathedral, and, not content with changing his own 
name, altered the maiden name of his wife from 
Gutteridge to Godriche. I am afraid Bishop Percy 
was a snob. 

There are, of course, cases in which men change 
their names for reputable reasons, to continue a 
distinguished family association and so on; but the 
man who does it to cover up his tracks has usually 
"something rotten about him," as Johnson would 
say. He stamps himself as a counterfeit coin, like 



ON BEING CALLED THOMPSON 117 

M. Fellaire in Anatole France's "Jocasta." When 
he first started business his brass plate ran "Fellaire 
(de Sisac)." On removing to new premises he dropped 
the parenthesis and put up a plate with "Fellaire, 
de Sisac." Changing residence again, he dropped 
the comma and became "Fellaire de Sisac." 

It is possible of course to go to the other extreme — 
to err, as it were, on the side of honesty. I know a 
lady who began life with the maiden name of Bloomer. 
She married a Mr. Watlington and became Mrs. 
Bloomer-Watlington. Her husband died and she 
married a Mr. Dodd, whereupon she styled herself 
Mrs. Bloomer-Watlington-Dodd. She is still fairly 
young and Mr. Dodd, I regret to say, is in failing 
health. Already I have to write her name in smallish 
characters to get it into a single line on the envelope. 
I see the time approaching when I shall have to turn 
over and write, let us say, 



There Is no need to be so aggressively faithful to 
one's names as all this. It is hard on your children 
and trying to your friends who may have difficulty 
in remembering which husband came before the others. 
After all, a name is only a label, and if it is honest the 
shorter it is the better. 

But the spirit of the thing is right. Let us avoid 
disguises. Let us stick to our names, be they ever 
so humble. For myself, I shall remain Thomson 
to the end of the chapter — and no "p" if you please. 




ON THINKING FOR ONE'S SELF 



A FRIEND of mine, to whom I owe so much of my 
gossip that I sometimes think that he does the work 
and I only take the collection, told me the other day 
of an incident at a picture exhibition which struck me 
as significant of a good deal that is wrong with us to- 
day. He observed two people in ecstasies before a cer- 
tain landscape. It was quite a nice picture, but my 
friend thought their praises were extravagant. Sud- 
denly one of the two turned to the catalogue. "Why 
this is not the Leader picture at all," said she. "It is 
No. So-and-So," And forthwith the two promptly 
turned away from the picture they had been admiring 
so strenuously, found No. So-and-So, and fell into rap- 
tures before that. 

Now I am not going to make fun of these people. 
I am not going to make fun of them because I am 
not sure that I don't suffer from their infirmity. If 
I don't I am certainly an exceptional person, for the 
people who really think for themselves are almost as 
scarce as virtuous people were found to be in the Cities 
of the Plain. We are most of us second-hand thinkers 
and second-hand thinkers are not thinkers at all. Those 
Ii8 



ON THINKING FOR ONE'S SELF 119 

good people before the picture were not thinking their 
own thoughts: they were thinking what they thought 
was the right thing to think. They had the luck to 
find themselves out. Probably it did not do them any 
good, but at least they knew privately what humbugs 
they were, what empty echoes of an echo they had dis- 
covered themselves to be. They had been taught — 
heaven help them ! — to admire those vacant prettinesses 
of Leader and they were so docile that they admired 
anything they believed to be his even when it wasn't 
his. 

It reminds me of the story of the two Italians who 
quarrelled so long and so bitterly over the relative 
merits of Tasso and Ariosto that at last they fought 
a duel. And as they lay dying on the ground one 
of them said to the other, "And to think that I have 
never read a line of them." "Nor I either," said the 
other. Then they expired. I do not suppose that 
story is true in fact, but it is true in spirit. Men 
are always dying for other people's opinions, prejudices 
they have inherited from somebody else, ideas they have 
borrowed second hand. Many of us go through life 
without ever having had a genuine thought of our own 
on any subject of the mind. We think in flocks and 
once in the flock we go wherever the bell-wether 
leads us. 

It is not only the ignorant who are afflicted with 
this servility of mind. Horace Walpole was enrap- 
tured with the Rowley Poems when he thought they 
were the work of a Mediaeval monk: when he found 
they were the work of Chatterton himself his interest 



I20 ON THINKING FOR ONE'S SELF 

in them ceased and he behaved to the poet like a cad. 
Yet the poems were far more wonderful as the pro- 
ductions of the "marvellous boy" of sixteen than they 
would have been as the productions of a man of sixty. 
The literary world of the eighteenth century thought 
Ossian hardly inferior to Homer ; but when Macpher- 
son's forgery was indisputable it dropped the imposture 
into the deepest pit of oblivion. Yet, as poetry, it was 
as good or bad — I have never read it — in the one case 
as in the other. 

There is a delicious story told by Anatole France 
which bears on this subject. In some examination in 
Paris the Military Board gave the candidates a piece 
of dictation consisting of an unsigned page. It was 
printed in the papers as an example of bad French. 
"Wherever did these military fellows," it was asked, 
"find such a farrago of uncouth and ridiculous 
phrases?" In his own literary circles Anatole France 
himself heard the passage held up to laughter and 
torn to tatters. The critic who laughed loudest, he 
says, was an enthusiastic admirer of Michelet. Yet 
the passage was from Michelet himself, from Michelet 
at his best, from Michelet in his finest period. How 
the great sceptic must have enjoyed that evening. 

It is not that we cannot think. It is that we are 
afraid to think. It is so much easier to go with the 
tide than against it, to shout with the crowd than to 
stand lonely and suspect in the midst of it. Even 
some of us who try to escape this hypnotism of the 
flock do not succeed in thinking independently. We 
only succeed in getting into other flocks. Think of 



ON THINKING FOR ONE'S SELF 121 

that avalanche of crazy art that descended on us 
some years ago, the Cubists and Dottists and Spottists 
and Futurists and other cranks, who filled London 
with their shows, and set all the "advanced" people 
singing their praises. They were not real praises 
that expressed genuine feeling. They were the 
artificial enthusiasms of people who wanted to join 
in the latest fashion. They would rave over any 
imbecility rather than not be in the latest fashion — 
rather than not be thought clever enough to find a 
meaning in things that had no meaning. 

We are too timid to think alone, too humble to 
trust our own feeling or our own judgment. We 
want some authority to lean up against, and when 
we have got it we mouth its shibboleths with as little 
independent thought as children reciting the "twice- 
times" table. I would rather a man should think 
ignorantly than that he should be merely an echo. 
I once heard an Evangelical clergyman in the pulpit, 
speaking of Shakespeare, gravely remark that he 
"could never see anything in that writer." I smiled 
at his naivete, but I respected his courage. He 
couldn't see anything in Shakespeare and he was too 
honest to pretend that he could. That is far better 
than the affectations with which men conceal the 
poverty of their minds and their intellectual servility. 

In other days the man that dared to think for 
himself ran the risk of being burned. Giordano 
Bruno, who was himself burned, has left us a descrip- 
tion of the Oxford of his day which shows how 
tyrannical established thought can be, Aristotle 



122 ON THINKING FOR ONE'S SELF 

was almost as sacred as the Bible, and the University 
statutes enacted that "Bachelors and Masters who 
did not follow Aristotle faithfully were liable to a 
fine of five shillings for every point of divergence and 
for every fault committed against the Logic of the 
Organon." We have liberated thought from the 
restraints of the policeman and the executioner since 
then, but in liberating it we have lost our reverence 
for its independence and integrity. We are free 
to think as we please, and so most of us cease to think 
at all, and follow the fashions of thought as servilely 
as we follow the fashions in hats. 

The evil, I suppose, lies in our education. We 
standardise our children. We aim at making them 
like ourselves instead of teaching them to be them- 
selves — new incarnations of the human spirit, new 
prophets and teachers, new adventurers in the wilder- 
ness of the world. We are more concerned about 
putting our thoughts into their heads than in drawing 
their thoughts out, and we succeed in making them 
rich in knowledge but poor in wisdom. They are 
not in fear of the stake, but they are in fear of the 
judgment of the world, which has no more title to 
respect than those old statutes of Oxford which we 
laugh at to-day. The truth, I fear, is that thought 
does not thrive on freedom. It only thrives under 
suppression. We need to have our liberties taken 
away from us in order to discover that they are worth 
dying for. 




ON SAWING WOOD 



I DO not think this article will be much concerned 
with the great art of sawing wood; but the theme 
of it came to me while I was engaged in that task. 
It was raining hard this morning, and it occurred to 
me that it was a good opportunity to cut some winter 
logs in the barn. The raw material of the logs lies 
at the end of the orchard in the shape of sections of 
trunks and branches of some old apple trees which 
David cut down for us last autumn, to enable us to 
extend the potato-patch by digging up a part of the 
orchard. I carried some of the sections into the barn 
and began to saw, but I was out of practice and had 
forgotten the trick. The saw would go askew, the 
points would dig in, and the whole operation seemed a 
clumsy failure. 

Then I remembered. You are over-doing it, I 

said. You are making a mess of the job by too 

much energy — misdirected energy. The trick of 

sawing wood is to work within your strength. You 

123 



124 ON SAWING WOOD 

are starting at it as if you intended to saw through 
the log at one stroke. It is the mistake the Rumanians 
have made in Transylvania. They bit off more than 
they could chew. You are biting off more than you 
can chew, and you and the log and the saw get at 
cross purposes, with the results you see. The art 
of the business is to work easily . and with a light 
hand, to make the incision with a firm stroke that 
hardly touches the surface, to move the saw forward 
lightly so that it barely touches the wood, to draw it 
back at a shade higher elevation, and above all to 
take your time and to avoid too much energy. "Gently 
does it" is the motto. 

It is a lesson I am always learning and forgetting. 
i suppose I am one of those people who are afflicted 
with too eager a spirit. We want a thing done, but 
we cannot wait to do it. We rush at the task with 
all our might and expect it to surrender on the spot, 
and when it doesn't surrender we lose patience, 
complain of our tools, and feel a grievance against 
the perversity of things. It reminds me of the 
remark which a professional made to me at the 
practice nets long ago. He was watching a fast 
bowler who was slinging the ball at the batsman like 
a whirlwind, and with disastrous results for himself. 
"He would make a good bowler," said the pro- 
fessional, "if he wouldn't try to bowl three balls at 
once." Recall any really great bowler you have 
known and you will find that the chief impression 
he left on the mind was that of ease and reserve 
power. He was never spending up to the hilt. There 



ON SAWING WOOD 125 

was always something left in the bank. I do not 
speak of the medium-paced bowler, like Lohmann, 
whose action had a sort of artless grace that masked 
the most wily and governed strategy; but of the 
fast bowler, like Tom Richardson or Mold or even 
Spofforth. With all their physical energy, you felt 
that their heads were cool and that they had some- 
thing in hand. There was passion, but it was con- 
trolled passion. 

And if you have tried mowing a meadow you will 
know how much the art consists in working within 
your powers, easily and rhythmically. The tempta- 
tion to lay on with all your might is overpowering, 
and you stab the ground and miss your stroke and 
exhaust yourself in sheer futility. And then you 
watch John Ruddle at the job and see the whole 
secret of the art reveal itself. He will mow for three 
hours on end with never a pause except to sharpen 
the blade with the whetstone he carries in his hip 
pocket. What a feeling of reserve there is in the 
beautiful leisureliness of his action. You could go 
to sleep watching him, and you feel that he could 
go to sleep to his own rhythm, as the mother falls 
asleep to her own swaying and crooning. There 
is the experience of a lifetime in that masterful tech- 
nique, but the point is that the secret of the tech- 
nique is its restraint, its economy of effort, its 
patience with the task, its avoidance of flurry and 
hurry, and of the waste and exhaustion of over- 
emphasis. At the bottom, all that John Ruddle has 



126 ON SAWING WOOD 

learned is not to try to bowl three balls at once. He 
is always master of his job. 

And if you chance to be a golfer, haven't you 
generally found that when you are "off your game" 
it is because you have pitched the key, as it were, 
too high? You smite and fail, and smite harder 
and fail, and go on increasing the effort, and as your 
effort increases so does your futility. You are play- 
ing over your strength. You are screaming at the 
ball instead of talking to it reasonably and sensibly. 
Then perhaps you remember, cut down your effort 
to the scope of your powers, and, behold, the ball 
sails away on its errand with just the right flight 
and just the right direction and just the right length. 
And you purr to yourself and learn once more that 
the art of doing things is moderation. 

It is so in all things. The man who wins is the 
man who keeps cool, whose effort is always propor- 
tioned to his power, who gives the impression that 
there is more in him than ever comes out. I have 
seen many a man lose the argument, not because he 
had the worse case, but because he was too eager, too 
impatient, too unrestrained in presenting it. What 
is the secret of the extraordinary influence which 
Viscount Grey exercises over the mind but the 
grave moderation and reserve of his style? There 
are scores of more eloquent speakers, more nimble 
disputants than he, but there has been no one in our 
time with the same authority and finality of speech. 
He conveys the sense of a mind disciplined against 
passion, austere in its reserve, implacably honest, 



ON SAWING WOOD 127 

understating itself with a certain cold aloofness that 
leaves controversy silent. Take his indictment of 
Germany as an example. It was as though the ver- 
dict of the Day of Judgment had fallen on Germany. 
Yet it was a mere grave, dispassionate statement of 
the facts without a word of extravagance or violence. 
It was the naked truthfulness of it that was so terrible 
and unanswerable. 

And much the most impressive description I have 
seen of the horrors of war was in a letter of a German 
artillery officer telling his experiences in the first 
great battle of the Somme. Yet the characteristic of 
the letter was its plainness and freedom from any 
straining after effect. He just left the thing he de- 
scribed to speak for itself in all its bare horror. It 
was a lesson we people who write would do well to 
remember. Let us have fewer adjectives, good peo- 
ple, fewer epithets. Remember, the adjective is the 
enemy of the noun. It is the scream that drowns the 
sense, the passion that turns the argument red in the 
face and makes it unbelievable. Was it not Stendhal 
who used to read the Code Napoleon once a year to 
teach him its severity of style? 

It is still raining. I will return to the barn and 
practise the philosophy of moderation on those logs. 




VARIATIONS ON AN OLD THEME 



A SOLDIER, whom I met in the train the other day, 
said that the most unpleasant thing in his experience 
of the war was the bodies which got caught in the 
barbed wire in No Man's Land, and had to be left 
corrupting in the sun. "It isn't healthy," he said. 
There was no affectation of bravado in the remark. 
He made it quite simply, as if he were commenting 
on the inclemency of the weather or the overheating 
of the carriage. It was not the tragedy of the thing 
that affected him, but its insanitariness. Yet he 
was obviously a kindly and humane man, and he 
talked of his home with the yearning of an exile. 
"It makes you think something of your home," he 
said, speaking of the war. "I shan't never want to 

128 



VARIATIONS ON AN OLD THEME 129 

leave my home when I get out of this, and I shan't 
never grumble at the missus again," he added, as 
though recalling the past. 

I suppose everyone who has talked to soldiers 
back from the war has been struck by this attitude 
of mind towards death. I remember a friend of 
mine, who was afterwards killed in the first battle 
of the Somme while trying to save one of his men 
who had been wounded, telling me of the horror of 
the first days of his experience of war, and of the 
subsequent calm with which he saw a man who had 
been his friend blown to pieces by his side. "It 
is as though war develops another integument," he 
said. "Your sensibilities are atrophied. Your nerve 
ends are deadened. Your normal feelings perish, and 
you become a part of a machine that has no feelings — 
only functions." 

In some measure the same phenomenon is apparent 
in the minds of most of us. There has not been 
since the Great Plague swept Europe 250 years ago 
such a harvesting of untimely death as we have 
witnessed during the last two and a half years. If 
the ghostly army of the slain were to file before you, 
passing in a rank of four for every minute that elapsed, 
you could sit and watch it day and night for five years 
without pause before the last of the phantom host had 
gone by. And if behind the dead there followed the 
maimed, blind, and mentally shattered, you could 
sit on for twenty years and still the end of the vast 
procession would not be in sight. If we had been 
asked three years ago whether the human mind could 



I30 VARIATIONS ON AN OLD THEME 

endure such a deliberate orgy of death in its most 
terrible form, we should have said the thing was 
incredible. Yet we live through it without revolt, 
clamour about the shortage of potatoes, crowd the 
cinemas to see the latest extravagance of Charlie 
Chaplin, and have forgotten to glance at the daily 
tale of dead that fills the obscure columns of the 
newspapers — such of them as trouble any longer to 
give that tale at all. 

It is not merely that we avert our eyes from the 
facts. That is certainly done. You may go to see 
the "war pictures" at the cinema and come away 
without supposing that they represent anything 
more than a skilfully arranged entertainment — in 
which one attractive "turn" follows another in 
swift succession. Once they actually showed a man 
falling dead, and there was a cry of indignation at 
such an outrage. Ten millions have fallen dead, 
but we must not look on one to remind us of the reality 
behind this pictured imposture. There has never 
been a lie on the scale of these "war pictures" that 
leave out war and all its sprawling ugliness, monotony, 
mutilation, and death. 

But it is not this fact that explains our apparent 
indifference to the Red Harvest. We are like the 
dyer's hand. We are subdued to what we work in. 
Even those who have been directly stricken find that 
they bear the blow with a calm that astonishes them- 
selves. We have got into a new habit of thought 
about death — in a sense a truer habit of thought. 
It used to be screened from the light of day, talked 




This generation has companioned Death too closely to see him 
again quite as the hooded terror of old. 



132 VARIATIONS ON AN OLD THEME 

of in hushed voices, surrounded with the mystery 
and aloofness of a terrible divinity. It has come 
into the open, brutal, naked, violent. We accept 
it as the commonplace it is, instead of enveloping 
it in a cloud of tragic fear and strangeness. The 
heart seems steeled to the blows of fate, looks death 
steadily in the face, understands that the individual 
life is merged in issues more vast than this little 
tale of years that, at the most, is soon told. 

It may be that, like the soldiers, our senses are 
only numbed by events, and that when we come out 
of the nightmare the old feelings will resume their 
sway. But it will be long before they recover their 
former tyranny over the mind. This generation 
has companioned Death too closely to see him again 
quite as the hooded terror of old. And that, I think, 
is a gain. I have always felt that Johnson's morbid 
attitude towards death was the weakest trait in a 
fine character, and that George Selwyn's perpetual 
absorption in the subject was a form of mental 
disease. Montaigne, too, lived with the constant 
thought of the imminence of death, so much so that 
if, when out walking, he remembered something he 
wanted done, he wrote down the request at once, 
lest he should not reach home alive. But he was 
quite healthy in his thought. It was not that he 
feared death, but that he did not want to be caught 
unawares. 

In this, as in most things, Czesar shone with that 
grand sanity that makes him one of the most illumi- 
nated secular minds in history. He neither sought 



VARIATIONS ON AN OLD THEME 133 

death nor shunned it. When Hirtius and Pansa 
remonstrated with him for going unprotected by a 
bodyguard, he answered, "It is better to die once 
than always to go in fear of death." That is the 
common-sense attitude — as remote from the spirit 
of the miser as from that of the spendthrift. And 
that other comment of his on death is equally deserv- 
ing of recall. He was dining the night before his 
murder at the house of Decimus Brutus, who had 
joined the conspiracy against him. As he sat des- 
patching his letters, the others talked of death and 
of that form of death which was preferable. One of 
the group asked Caesar what death he would prefer. 
He looked up from his papers and said, "That which 
is least expected." This was not an old man's 
weariness of life such as that which made Lord 
Holland, the father of Charles James Fox, write to 
Selwyn: "And yet the man I envy most is the late 
Lord Chamberlain, for he is dead and he died 
suddenly." It was just the Roman courage that 
accepted death as an incident of the journey. 

Of that high courage the end of Antoninus Pius is 
an immortal memory. As the Emperor lay dying 
in his tent the tribune of the night-watch entered 
to ask the watchword. "^Equanimitas," said 
Antoninus Pius, and with that last word he, in 
the language of the historian, "turned his face to the 
everlasting shadow." 

With that grave calm the philosophy of the 
ancient world touched its noblest expression. It 
faced the shadow without illusions and without 



134 VARIATIONS ON AN OLD THEME 

fear. It met death neither as an enemy, nor as a 
friend, but as an implacable fact to be faced implac- 
ably. Sir Thomas More met it like a bridegroom. 
In all the literature of death there is nothing com- 
parable with Roper's story of those last days in the 
Tower. Who can read that moving description of 
the farewell with his daughter Margaret (Roper's 
wife) without catching its pity and its glory? "In 
good faythe, Maister Roper," said stout Sir William 
Kingstone, the gaoler, "I was ashamed of myself 
that at my departing from your father I found my 
harte soe feeble and his soe stronge, that he was 
fayne to comfort me that should rather have com- 
forted him." And when Sir Thomas Pope comes 
early on St. Thomas' Even with the news that he 
is to die at nine o'clock that morning and falls weeping 
at his own tidings — "Quiet yourselfe, Good Maister 
Pope," says More, "and be not discomforted; for 
I trust that we shall once in heaven see eche other 
full merily, where we shalbe sure to live and love 
togeather, in joyfull blisse eternally." And then, 
Pope being gone. More "as one that had beene 
invited to some solempne feaste, chaunged himself 
into his beste apparrell; which Maister Leiftenante 
espyinge, advised him to put it off, saying that he 
that should have it was but a javill (a common 
fellow: the executioner). What, Maister Leiftenante, 
quothe he, shall I accompte him a javill that shall 
doe me this day so singular a benefitt? Nay, I 
assure you, were it clothe of goulde, I would accompte 
it well bestowed upon him, as St. Ciprian did, who 



VARIATIONS ON AN OLD THEME 135 

gave his executyoner thirtye peeces of golde. . . . 
And soe was he by Maister Leiftenante brought out 
of the Tower and from thence led towardes the place 
of execution. Wher, goinge up the scaffold, which 
was so weake that it was readye to fall, he said 
merilye to Maister Leiftenante, I praye you, Maister 
Leiftenante, see me safe uppe and for my cominge 
down let me shift for myselfe. Then desired he all 
the people there aboute to pray for him, and to bare 
witnes with him that he should now there suffer 
deathe, in and for the faith of the Holy Catholicke 
Churche. Which donne, he kneeled downe; and 
after his prayers sayed, turned to the executioner, 
and with a cheerful countenance spake thus unto 
him: 'Plucke uppe thy spiritts, manne, and be not 
affrayde to doe thine office; my necke is very shorte, 
take heede, therfore, thou strike not awrye for savinge 
of thine honesty.' So passed Sir Thomas More out 
of this worlde to God, upon the very same daye (the 
Utas of St. Peter) in which himself had most de- 
sired." 

The saint of the pagan world and the saint of the 
Christian world may be left to share the crown of 
noble dying. 



II 



I had rather a shock to-day. I was sitting down 
to write an article on a subject that had still to be 
found, and had almost reached the point of decision, 
when a letter which had been addressed to the 



136 VARIATIONS ON AN OLD THEME 

Editor of The Star, and which he had sent on to me, 
started another and more attractive hare. It was 
a letter announcing my lamented demise. There 
was no doubt about it. There was the date and 
there was the name (a nice name too), and there 
were the circumstances all set out in black and white. 
And the writer wanted to know, in view of all this, 
why no obituary notice of me had appeared in the 
columns of the paper I had adorned. 

Now this report, however it arose, is, to use Mark 
Twain's famous remark in similar circumstances, 
"greatly exaggerated." I am not dead. I am not 
half dead. I am not even feeling poorly. I had a 
tooth out a week or two ago, but otherwise nothing 
dreadful has happened to me for ever so long. I 
was once nearly in a shipwreck, but that was so long 
ago that I had almost forgotten the circumstance. 
Moreover, as all the people in the ship were saved I 
could not possibly have died then even if I had been 
on board. And I wasn't on board, for I had left at 
the previous port of call. It was a narrow escape, 
but I can't pretend that I wasn't saved. I was. 

But though I am most flagrantly and aggressively 
alive, the announcement of my death has set me 
thinking of myself as if I were dead. I find it quite 
an agreeable diversion. Not that I am morbid. I 
do not share my friend Clerihew's view, expressed 
in his chapter on Lord Clive in that noble work 
"Biography for Beginners." You may remember 
the chapter. If not, it is short enough to repeat: — 



VARIATIONS ON AN OLD THEME 137 

What I like about Clive 
Is that he is no longer alive. 
There's something to be said 
For being dead. 

That is overdoing the thing. What I find agreeable 
is being alive and thinking I am dead. You have 
the advantage of both worlds, so to speak. In com- 
pany w^ith this amiable correspondent, I have shed 
tears over myself. I have wept at my own grave- 
side. I have composed my own obituary notice, and 
I don't think I have ever turned out a more moving 
piece of work. I have met my friends and condoled 
with them over my decease, and have heard their 
comments, and I am proud to say that they were 
quite nice. Some of them made me think that I 
might write up the obituary notice in a rather higher 
key, put the virtues of the late lamented ''Alpha of 
the Plough" in more gaudy colours, tone down the 
few, the very few, weak points of his austere, saintly, 
chivalrous, kindly, wise, humorous, generous char- 
acter — in a word, let myself go a bit more. Old 
Grumpington at the club, it is true, said that I should 
be no great loss to the world, and that so far as he 
was concerned I was one of the people that he could 
do without. But then Old Grumpington never 
says a good word for anybody, living or dead. I 
discounted Grumpington. I took no notice of 
Grumpington — the beast. 

And then I passed from the living world I had 
left behind to the contemplation of the said Alpha, 
fallen on sleep, and I found his case no subject for 



138 VARIATIONS ON AN OLD THEME 

tears. After all, said I, the world is not such a gay 
place in these days, that I need worry about having 
quitted it. I have left some dear friends behind, 
but they will pass the toll-gate too in due course, 
and join me and those who have preceded me. 
"What dreams may come!" Well, so be it. I 
have no fear of the dreams of death, having passed 
through the dream of life, which was so often like a 
nightmare. If there are dreams for me, I think they 
will be better dreams. If there are tasks for me, I 
think they will be better tasks. If there are no dreams 
and no tasks, then that also is well. "I see no such 
horror in a dreamless sleep," said Byron in one of his 
letters, "and I have no conception of any existence 
which duration would not make tiresome." And so, 
dreamless or dreaming, I saw nothing in the circum- 
stances of the departed Alpha to lament. . . . 

Meanwhile, I am very well indeed, thank you. If 
you prick me I shall still bleed. If you tickle me I 
shall still laugh. And with due encouragement I 
shall still write. 



Ill 



I was going home late last night from one of the 
Tube stations when my companion pointed to a 
group — a man in a bowler hat, reading a paper, two 
women and a child — sitting on a seat on the platform. 
"There they are," he said. "Every night and any 
hour, moonlight or moonless, you'll find them sitting 
there." "What for?" I asked. "Oh, in case there's 



VARIATIONS ON AN OLD THEME 139 

a raid. They are taking things in time; they are 
running no risks. You'll see a few at most stations." 
And as the train passed from station to station I 
noticed similar little groups on the platforms, sleeping 
or just staring vacantly at nothing in particular, and 
waiting till the lights went out and they could wait no 
longer. 

There is no discredit in taking reasonable precau- 
tions against danger, but these good people carry 
apprehension to excess. We need not under-rate 
the risks of the raids, but we need not make ourselves 
ridiculous about them. So far as the average in- 
dividual life is concerned they are almost negligible. 
Assuming that the circumference of danger of an 
exploding bomb is 90 yards, and that the Germans 
drop two hundred bombs a month on London, it is, 
I understand, calculated that it will be thirty-four 
years before we have all come in the zone of danger. 
But the Germans do not drop two hundred bombs 
a month, nor twenty bombs, probably not ten bombs. 
Let us assume, however, that they get up to an aver- 
age of twenty bombs. It will be over three hundred 
years before we have all come within the range of 
peril. I do not suggest that this reflection justifies 
us in going out into the streets when a raid is on. It 
is true I may not get my turn for three hundred years, 
but still there is no sense in running out to see if 
my turn has come. So I dive below ground as 
promptly as anybody. It is foolish to take risks that 
you need not take. But it is not less foolish to go 
and sit for hours every night on a Tube station plat- 



I40 VARIATIONS ON AN OLD THEME 

form, not because there is a raid, but because there 
may be a raid. 

This is carrying the fear of death to extremities. 
I have referred to Caesar's sane axiom on the subject, 
and to his refusal to take what seemed to others reason- 
able precautions against danger. In the end he was 
murdered, but in the meantime he had lived as no 
one whose life is one nervous apprehension of danger 
can possibly live. You may, of course, carry this 
philosophy of fearless living to excess. Smalley, 
in his reminiscences, tells us that when King Edward 
(then Prince of Wales) was staying at Homburg he 
said one day to Lord Hartington (the late Duke of 
Devonshire), "Hartington, you ought not to drink 
all that champagne." "No, sir, I know I ought not," 
said Hartington. "Then why do you do it?" 
"Well, sir, I have made up my mind that I would 
rather be ill now and then than always taking care 
of myself." "Oh, you think that now, but when 
the gout comes what do you think then?" "Sir, if 
you will ask me then I will tell you. I do not 
anticipate." 

I do not commend Hartington's example for 
imitation any more than the example of those forlorn 
little groups on the Tube platforms. He was not 
refusing, like Caesar, to be bullied by vague fears; 
he was, for the sake of a present pleasure, laying up 
a store of tolerably certain misery. It was not a 
case of fearless living, but of careless living, which 
is quite another thing. But at least he got a present 
pleasure for his recklessness, while the people who 



VARIATIONS ON AN OLD THEME 141 

hoard up life like misers, and see the shadow of death 
stalking them all the time, do not live at all. They 
only exist. They are like Chesterfield in his later 
years. "I am become a vegetable," he said. "I have 
been dead twelve years, but I don't want anyone to 
know about it." Those people in the Tube are quite 
dead, although they don't know about it. What is 
more, they have never been alive. 

You cannot be alive unless you take life gallantly. 
You know that the Great Harvester is tracking you 
all the time, and that one day, perhaps quite suddenly, 
his scythe will catch you and lay you among the 
sheaves of the past. Every day and every hour he 
is remorselessly at your heels. A breath of bad air 
will do his work, or the prick of a pin, or a fall on 
the stairs, or a draught from the window. You can't 
take a ride in a bus, or a row in a boat, or a swim in 
the sea, or a bat at the wicket without offering your- 
self as a target for the enemy. I have myself seen 
a batsman receive a mortal blow from a ball driven 
by his companion at the wicket. Why, those people 
so forlornly dodging death in the Tube were not out 
of the danger zone. They were probably in more 
peril sitting there nursing their fears, lowering their 
vitality, and incubating death than they would have 
been going about their reasonable tasks in the fresh 
air above. You may die from the fear of death. 

I am not preaching Nietzsche's gospel of "Live 
dangerously," There is no need to try to live 
■dangerously, and no sense in going about tweaking 
the nose of death to show what a deuce of a fellow 



142 VARIATIONS ON AN OLD THEME 

you are. The truth is that we cannot help living 
dangerously. Life is a dangerous calling, full of 
pitfalls. You, getting the coal in the mine by the 
light of your lamp, are living with death very, very 
close at hand. You, on the railway shunting trucks, 
you in the factory or the engine shop moving in a 
maze of machinery, you in the belly of the ship stoking 
the fire — all alike are in an adventure that may 
terminate at any moment. Let us accept the fact 
like men, and dismiss it like men, going about our 
tasks as though we had all eternity to live in, not 
foolishly challenging profitless perils, but, on the other 
hand, declining to be intimidated by the shadow of the 
scythe that dogs our steps. 



IV 



It is, I suppose, a common experience that our 
self-valuations are not fixed but fluctuating. Some- 
times the estimate is extravagantly high; sometimes, 
but less frequently, it is too low. There are people, 
no doubt, whose vanity is so vast that no drafts 
upon it make any appreciable difference to the fund. 
It is as inexhaustible as the horn of Skrymir. And 
there are others whose humility is so established 
that no emotion of vain-glory ever visits them. But 
the generality of us go up and down according to 
the weather, our health, our fortune and a hundred 
trifles good or bad. We are like corks on the wave, 
sometimes borne buoyantly on the crest of the heaving 
sea of circumstance, then sinking into the trough of 



VARIATIONS ON AN OLD THEME 143 

the billows. At this moment I am in the trough. 
I have been passing through one of these chastening 
experiences which reveal to us how unimportant we 
are to the world. When we are in health we bustle 
about and talk and trade and write and push and 
thrust and haggle and bargain and feel that we are 
tremendous fellows. However would the world get 
on without us? we say. What would become of 
the office? Who could put those schemes through 
that I have in hand? What on earth would that dear 
fellow Robinson do without my judgment to lean on? 
What would become of Jones if he no longer met me 
after lunch at the club for a quiet and confidential 
talk? How would The Star survive without . . . 

And so we inflate ourselves with a comfortable 
conceit, and feel that we are really the hub of things, 
and that if anything goes wrong with us there will 
be a mournful vacuum in society. Then some day 
the bubble of our vanity is pricked. We are gently 
laid aside, deflated and humble, the world forgetting, 
by the world forgot. Our empire has shrunk to the 
dimensions of a sick-room, and there fever plays 
its wild dramas, turning the innocent patterns of 
the wall-paper into fantastic shapes, and fearsome 
conflicts, filling our unquiet slumbers with dreadful 
phantoms that, waking, we try to seize, only to fall 
back defeated and helpless. And then follow the 
days — those peaceful days — of sheer collapse, when 
you just lie back on the pillow and look hour by hour 
at the ceiling, desiring nothing and thinking of 



144 VARIATIONS ON AN OLD THEME 

nothing, and when the doctor, feeling your stagnant 
pulse, says, "Yes, you have had a bad shaking." 

These are the days of illumination. Outside the 
buses rumble by, and you know they are crowded 
with people going down to or returning from the 
great whirlpool. And you realise that the mighty 
world is thundering on in the old way as though it 
had never heard of you. Fleet Street roars by night 
and day in happy unconcern of you; your absence 
from "the Gallery" in the afternoon is unnoted by 
a soul; Robinson gives one thought to you, and then 
turns to his work as though nothing had happened; 
Jones misses you after lunch, but is just as happy with 
Brown ; and The Star — well, The Star . . . yes, 
the painful fact has to be faced. . . . The Star 
goes on its radiant path as though you had only been 
a fly on its wheel. 

It is a humbling experience. This, then, was all 
your high-blown pride amounted to. You were just 
a bubble on the surface, a snowflake on the river — 
a moment there, then gone for ever. This is the 
foretaste of death. When that comes the waters will 
just close over your head as they have closed 
now — a comment here and there, perhaps friendly, 
perhaps critical, a few tears it may be, and — oblivion. 
It is an old story — old as humanity. You remember 
those verses of Dean Swift on the news of his own 
death, with what airy jests and indifference it was 
received in this and that haunt where he had played 
so great a part. It comes to a card party who a£Fect 
to receive it in "doleful dumps." 



VARIATIONS ON AN OLD THEME 145 

"The Dean is dead (pray what is trumps?") 
Then "Lord have mercy on his soul ! 
(Ladies, I'll venture for the vole). 
Six deans, they say, must bear the pall, 
. (I wish I knew what king to call). 
Madam, your husband will attend 
The funeral of so good a friend?" 
"No, madam, 'tis a shocking sight; 
And he's engaged to-morrow night; 
My Lady Club will take it ill 
If he should fail her at quadrille. 
He loved the Dean (I lead a heart) ; 
But dearest friends, they say, must part." 

That is the way of it. Your friend is dead: you 
heave a sigh and lead a heart. 

Listen to that thrush outside. How he is going 
it! He, too, on this bright March morning sings of 
the world's indifference — the indifference of the 
joyous, living world to those who have crept to their 
holes. I hear in his voice the news of the coming of 
spring, and know that down at "the cottage" the 
crocuses are out in the garden and the dark beech- 
woods are turning to brown, and the lark is springing 
up into the blue like a flame of song. How I have 
loved this pageantry of nature, these days of revela- 
tion and promise. I used to think that I was a part 
of them, but now I know that the pageant goes 
forward in sublime unconsciousness that I am no longer 
in the audience. 

And so -I lie and look at the ceiling and feel humble 
and disillusioned. I have discovered that the world 
goes on very well without me, and I am not sure 



146 VARIATIONS ON AN OLD THEME 

that it is not worth spending a week or two in bed 
to learn that salutary lesson. When I return to the 
world I fancy I shall have lost some of my ancient 
swagger. I shall feel like a modest intruder upon a 
society that has shown it has no need of me. I 
may recover my feeling of importance in time, but 
in my secret heart I shall know that I am not the 
hub but only a fly on the mighty wheel of things. I 
can skip off and no one is any the wiser. 




4*1 ,i/ui ii.ifi'" 1 «»»«•»;•, t IW 




ON CLOTHES 

There is one respect in which the war has brought 
us a certain measure of relief. It is no longer neces- 
sary to lie awake o' nights thinking about your clothes. 
There are some people, of course, who like thinking 
about their clothes. They seem to regard themselves 
as perambulating shop window models on which to 
hang things, and if you take away that subject from 
their conversation they are bankrupt. When I was 
coming down on the bus the other afternoon I could 
not help overhearing snatches of a conversation which 
was going on between two women in the seat behind 
me. It was conducted with great volubility and 
seriousness, and it came to me in scraps like this: "No, 
I don't like that shade. ... I saw a beautiful hat 
at So-and-So's at Kensington; only 25s.; it was 
147 



148 ON CLOTHES 

, . . Yes, she has nice taste and always looks . . . 
No, brocaded . . ." And so on without a pause 
for the space of half an hour. 

I don't offer that conversation as representative. 
I imagine that in the lump women are thinking less 
about dress to-day from the merely ornamental 
point of view than they ever did. If you spend 
twelve hours a day on a bus or a tram in a blue 
uniform and leggings, or driving a Carter Paterson 
van in a mackintosh and a sou-wester, or filling shells 
in a yellow overall, dress cannot occupy quite its old 
dominion over your thoughts. You will think more 
about comfort and less about finery. And that, ac- 
cording to Herbert Spencer, is an evidence of a higher 
intelligence. The more barbaric you are the more 
you regard dress from the point of view of ornament 
and the less from the point of view of utility. It is 
a hard saying for the West End of life. Spencer, 
to illustrate his point, mentions that the African at- 
tendants of Captain Speke strutted about in their 
goatskin mantles when the weather was fine, but when 
it was wet took them off, folded them up, and went 
about naked and shivering in the rain. 

A talk like that of the two women on the bus 
would not be possible among men; but that does 
not mean that they have souls above finery. It is 
not good form among them to talk about dress — 
that is all. But that many of them think about it 
as seriously as women do, if less continuously, is 
certain. Pepys' Diary is strewn with such self- 
revelations as "This morning came home my fine 



ON CLOTHES 149 

Camlett cloak, with gold buttons, and a silk suit, 
which cost me much money, and I pray God to make 
me able to pay for it." He ought to have thought 
of that earlier. No one is entitled to order fine 
clothes and then throw the responsibility for paying 
for them on the Almighty. At least he might have 
prayed to God on the subject before approaching 
the tailor. The case of Goldsmith was not less 
conspicuous. He was as vain as a peacock, and re- 
fused to go into the Church because he loved to wear 
bright clothes. And his spirit is not dead among men. 

Who can look upon the large white spats of 

as he comes down the floor of the House without 
feeling that he is as dress-conscious as a milliner? 

I am not speaking with disrespect of the well- 
dressed man . ( I do not mean the over-dressed man : 
he is an offence). I would be well-dressed myself if 
I knew how, but I have no gift that way. Like 
Squire Shallow, I am always in the rearward of the 
fashion. I find that with rare exceptions I dislike 
new fashions. They disturb my tranquillity. They 
give me a nasty jolt. I suspect that the explanation 
is that beneath my intellectual radicalism there lurks 
a temperamental conservatisim, a love of sleepy 
hollows and quiet havens and the old grass-grown 
turnpikes of habit. It is no uncommon paradox. 
Spurgeon had it like many others. He was once 
rebuked by a friend for his political activity on the 
Liberal side. Why did he yield to this weakness? 
"You ought to mortify the Old Man," said his friend. 
"I do mortify him," said Spurgeon. "You see my 



I50 ON CLOTHES 

Old Man is a Tory and I make him vote Liberal. 
That mortifies him." I am conscious of the same 
conflict within myself, and in the matter of clothes 
the Old Man of Toryism is an easy winner. 

It was so with Carlyle. He raged like a bear with 
a sore head against the existing political fashion of 
things, but in the matter of clothes he was a mere 
antediluvian, and when he wanted a new suit he 
simply wrote to the little country tailor in far-off 
Ecclefechan and told him to send another "as before." 
And so, by taking no thought about the matter, he 
achieved the distinction in appearance which the 
people who worry about clothes do not achieve. The 
flavour of the antique world hung about him like a 
fragrance, as, but yesterday, it hung about Lord Court- 
ney who looked like a reminiscence of the world of our 
grandfathers walking our streets to the rebuke of a 
frivolous generation. 

I cannot claim to exhale this fine essence of the 
past. I am just an ordinary camp follower of the 
fashions, too perverse to march with the main army, 
too timid to ignore it, but just hanging on its skirts 
as it were, a forlorn relic of the year before last. My 
taste in ties, I am assured, is execrable. My clothes 
are lacking in style, and my boots have an uncon- 
querable tendency to shapelessness. I put on what- 
ever is handiest without a thought of artistic design. 
My pockets bulge with letters and books, and I am 
constantly reminded by well-meaning people that 
the top button of my waistcoat is unbuttoned. I 
am perfectly happy until I come into contact with 



ON CLOTHES 151 

the really well-dressed man who has arranged himself 
on a conscious scheme, and looks like a sartorial 
poem. I lunched with such a man a few days ago. 
I could not help envying the neat perfection of every- 
thing about him, and I knew, as his eye wandered 
to my tie, that there was something there that made 
him shudder as a harsh discord in music would make 
me shudder. It may have been the wrong shade; 
it may have been awry; it may have been anything 
that it oughtn't to have been. I shall never know. 

And it is a great joy to be able not to care. The 
war has lightened the cloud that hangs over those 
of us who simply cannot be dressy no matter how 
much we try. It is no longer an offence to appear a 
little secondhand. It is almost a virtue. You may 
wear your oldest clothes and look the whole world 
in the face and defy its judgments. You may claim 
that your baggy knees are a sacrifice laid on the 
altar of patriotism and that the hat of yester-year 
is another nail in the coffin of the Kaiser. A dis- 
tinguished Parliamentarian, a man who has sat in 
Cabinets, boasted to me the other day that he had 
not bought a suit of clothes since the war began, 
and I had no difficulty in believing the statement. 

That is the sort of example that makes me happy. 
It gives me the feeling that I am at last really in the 
fashion — the fashion of old and unconsidered clothes. 
It is a very comfortable fashion. It saves you worry 
and it saves you money. I hope it will continue 
when the war has become a memory. And if we 
want a literary or historical warrant for it we may go 



152 



ON CLOTHES 



to old Montaigne. When he was a young fellow 
without means, he says somewhere, he decked himself 
out in brave apparel to show the world that he was a 
person of consequence; but when he came to his 
fortune he went in sober attire and left his estates 
and his chateaux to speak for him. That is the way 
of us unfashionable folk. We leave our estates and 
our chateaux to speak for us. 





THE DUEL THAT FAILED 



"I THINK," said my friend, "that the war will end 
when the Germans know they are beaten. No, that 
is not quite so banal a prophecy as it seems. Wars 
do not always end with the knowledge of defeat. 
They only end with the admission of defeat, which is 
quite another thing. The Civil War dragged on for 
a year after the South knew that they were beaten. 
All that bloodshed in the Wilderness was suffered in 
the teeth of the incontrovertible fact that it was in 
vain. But the man or the nation which adopts the 
philosophy of the bully does not fight when the cer- 
tainty of victory has changed into the certainty of de- 
feat. I have never known a bully who was not a 
coward when his back was to the wall. The French 
are at their best in the hour of defeat. There was 
nothing so wonderful in the story of Napoleon as that 
astonishing campaign of 1814, and even in 1870-1 it 
was the courage of France when all was lost that was 
the most heroic phase of the war. But the bully col- 
lapses when the stimulus of victory has deserted him. 

"Let me tell you a story. In 1883, having grad- 
uated at Dublin, I went to Heidelberg — alt Heidel- 

153 



154 THE DUEL THAT FAILED 

berg du feine. You know that jolly city, and the 
students who swagger along the street, their faces 
seamed with the scars of old sword cuts. I was one 
of a group of young fellows from different countries 
who were studying at the University, and who fra- 
ternised in a strange land. 

"It was about the time when the safety bicycle was 
introduced in England, and one of our group, a young 
Polish nobleman who had a great passion for English 
things, got a machine sent over to him from London. 
If not the first, it was certainly one of the first ma- 
chines of the kind that had appeared in Heidelberg. 
You may remember how strange it seemed even to the 
English public when it first came out. We had got 
accustomed to the old high bicycle, and the 'Safety' 
looked ridiculous and babyish by comparison. 

"Well, in Heidelberg the appearance of the young 
Pole on his 'Safety' created something like a sensa- 
tion. The sports of the 'Englander' were held in con- 
tempt by the students, and this absurd toy was the 
last straw. It was the very symbol of the childish- 
ness of a nation given over to the sport of babes. 

"One day the Pole was riding out on his bicycle 
when he passed a couple of students, who shouted op- 
probrious epithets at the 'Englander' and his prepos- 
terous vehicle. The Pole turned round, flung some 
verbal change back at them, and rode on his way. 

"That evening as he sat in his room he heard steps 
ascending the stairs, and there entered two students 
clothed in all the formality of grave business. They 
had brought the Pole a challenge to a duel from each 



THE DUEL THAT FAILED 155 

of the two young fellows with whom he had exchanged 
words on the road. The challenges were couched in 
the most ruthless terms. This was to be no mere 
nominal satisfaction of honour. It was to be a duel 
without guards or any of those restrictions that are 
cr'e mon in such affairs. The weapon was the sword, 
t i. the time-limit eight days. 

"The seconds having fulfilled their errand went 
away, leaving the Pole in no cheerful frame of mind. 
He was only a very indifferent swordsman, and had 
never cultivated the sport of duelling. Now suddenly 
he was faced with the necessity of fighting a duel in 
which he would certainly be beaten, and might be 
killed, for he understood the intentions of the chal- 
lengers. It was clearly not possible for him to acquire 
in a week such expertness with the sword as would 
give him a chance of victory. 

"In this emergency he came along to the little 
group of which I have spoken. We were playing cards 
when he entered, but stopped when we saw that some- 
thing unusual had happened. He told us the story of 
the bicycle ride and the sequel. What was he to do? 
He must fight, of course, but how was he to get a dog's 
chance ? 

"Now the oldest of our group, and by far the most 
worldly wise, was an American. He listened to the 
Pole and agreed that there was no time for him to 
become sufficiently expert with the sword. 'But can 
you shoot?' he asked the Pole. Yes, he was not a bad 
shot. The American took up an ace from a pack of 
cards and held it up. 'Could you, standing where you 



156 THE DUEL THAT FAILED 

are, hit that ace with a revolver?' 'I am not sure that 
I could hit it,' answered the Pole, 'but I should come 
very near it.' 'That's all right,' said the American. 
'Now to business. These fellows have forgotten some- 
thing. They're so used to fighting with the sword 
that they've forgotten there's such a thing as the 'e- 
volver. And they're trying to bluff you into their cJwn 
terms. They've forgotten, or don't choose to remem- 
ber, that, as the challenged party, you have choice of 
weapons. Now we'll draw up an answer to this letter, 
accepting the challenge, claiming the choice of weapons, 
choosing the revolver, and putting the conditions as 
stiff as we can make 'em.' 

"So we sat around the American and composed the 
reply. And I can assure you it had a very ugly look. 
The Pole signed it with great delight, and the Ameri- 
can and I as seconds delivered it. 

"Then we waited. One day passed without an an- 
swer — two, three, four, five, six. Still no answer. We 
were enjoying ourselves. On the evening of the sev- 
enth day the seconds reappeared at the Pole's rooms. 
They brought no acceptance of his challenge, but an 
impudent demand for the original conditions. The 
Pole came along to us with the news. 'That's all 
right,* said the American. 'We've got them on the 
run. Now to clinch the business.' And once more we 
sat round in great glee to draft the reply. It was as 
hot as we knew how to make it. It breathed death in 
every syllable, and it gave the Germans eight days to 
prepare for the end at the muzzle of the revolver. 

"Again we waited, and again the days passed with- 



THE DUEL THAT FAILED 157 

out a sign. Then on the eve of the eighth day the 
seconds once more appeared. I was present with the 
Pole at the time. I have never seen a more forlorn 
pair than those seconds made as they entered. Their 
principals, driven into a corner, faced with the alterna- 
tive of fighting with weapons which did not assure 
them victory or of accepting the humiliation of run- 
ning away, had decided to run away. They would 
not fight on the conditions offered by the Pole, and 
the seconds were a spectacle of humiliation. Their 
apologies to us struggled with their indignation at their 
principals and they went away a chastened spectacle. 
That night we had a gay gathering with the American 
in the chair, and I think the incident must have got 
wind abroad, for thenceforward the Pole rode his 
Safety in peace and in triumph. . . . 

"You may think that story is a trifle. Well it is. 
But I think it has some bearing on the end of the war." 





ON EARLY RISING 



There is no period of the year when my spirit is 
so much at war with the flesh as this. For the winter 
is over, and the woods are browning and the choristers 
of the fields are calling me to matins — and I do not 
go. Spiritually I am an early riser. I have a passion 
for the dawn and the dew on the grass, and the "early 
pipe of half-awakened birds." On the rare occasions 
on which I have gone out to meet the sun upon the 
upland lawn or on the mountain tops I have experi- 
enced an emotion that perhaps no other experience can 
give. I remember a morning in the Tyrol when I had 
climbed Kitzbulhhorn to see the sun rise. I saw the 
darkness changing to chill grey, but no beam of sun- 
light came through the massed clouds that barred the 
east. Feeling that my night climb had been in vain, I 
turned round to the west, and there, by a sort of magi- 
cal reflection, I saw the sunrise. A beam of light, in- 
visible to the east, had pierced the clouds and struck 
the mountains in the west. It seemed to turn them 
158 



ON EARLY RISING 159 

to molten gold, and as it moved along the black mass 
it was as though a vast torch was setting the world 
aflame. And I remembered that fine stanza of 
Clough's: — 

And not through eastern windows only, 
When morning comes, comes in the light. 

In front the dawn breaks slow, how slowly. 
But westward, look, the land is bright. 

And there was that other dawn which I saw, from 
the icy ridge of the Petersgrat, turning the snow-clad 
summits of the Matterhorn, the Weisshorn, and Mont 
Blanc to a magic realm of rose-tinted battlements. 

And there are others. But they are few, for though 
I am spiritually a son of the morning, I am physically 
a sluggard. There are some people who are born 
with a gift for early rising. I was born with a genius 
for lying in bed. I can go to bed as late as anybody, 
and have no joy in a company that begins to yawn 
and grow drowsy about ten o'clock. But in the early 
rising handicap I am not a starter. A merciful provi- 
dence has given me a task that keeps me working far 
into the night and makes breakfast and the newspaper 
in bed a matter of duty. No words can express the 
sense of secret satisfaction with which I wake and 
realise that I haven't to get up, that stern duty bids 
me lie a little longer, listening to the comfortable 
household noises down below and the cheerful songs 
outside, studying anew the pattern of the wall-paper 
and taking the problems of life "lying down" in no 
craven sense. 



i6o ON EARLY RISING 

I know there are many people who have to catch 
early morning buses and trams who would envy me 
if they knew my luck. For the ignoble family of 
sluggards is numerous. It includes many distinguished 
men. It includes saints as well as sages. That moral 
paragon, Dr. Arnold, was one of them ; Thomson, the 
author of "The City of Dreadful Night," was another. 
Bishop Selwyn even put the duty of lying in bed on a 
moral plane. "I did once rise early," he said, "but I 
felt so vain all the morning and so sleepy all the after- 
noon that I determined not do it again." He stayed 
in bed to mortify his pride, to make himself humble. 
And is not humility one of the cardinal virtues of a 
good Christian? I have fancied myself that people who 
rise early are slightly self-righteous. They can't help 
feeling a little scornful of us sluggards. And we know 
it. Humility is the badge of all our tribe. We are not 
proud of lying in bed. We are ashamed — and happy. 
The noblest sluggard of us all has stated our case for 
us. "No man practises so well as he writes," said Dr. 
Johnson. "I have all my life been lying till noon; 
yet I tell all young men, and tell them with great 
sincerity, that nobody who does not rise early will ever 
do any good." 

Of course we pay the penalty. We do not catch 
the early worm. When we turn out all the bargains 
have gone, and we are left only with the odds and 
ends. From a practical point of view, we have no 
defence. We know that an early start is the secret 
of success. It used to be said of the Duke of New- 
castle that he always went about as though he had 



ON EARLY RISING l6i 

got up half an hour late, and was trying all day to 
catch it up. And history has recorded what a gro- 
tesque failure he was in politics. When someone asked 
Nelson for the secret of his success he replied: "Well, 
you see, I always manage to be a quarter of an hour in 
front of the other fellow." And the recipe holds good 
to-day. When the inner history of the battle of the 
Falkland Islands is told in detail it will be found that 
it was the early start insisted on by the one man of 
military genius that gave us that priceless victory. 

And if you have ever been on a walking tour or a 
cycling tour you know that early rising is the key of 
the business. Start early and you are master of your 
programme and your fate. You can linger by the way, 
take a dip in the mountain tarn, lie under the shadow 
of a great rock in the hot afternoon, and arrive at the 
valley inn in comfortable time for the evening meal. 
Start late and you are the slave of the hours. You 
chase them with weary feet, pass the tarn with the 
haste of a despatch bearer though you are dying for a 
bathe, and arrive when the roast and boiled are cleared 
away and the merry company are doing a "traverse"' 
around the skirting board of the billiard room. Happy 
reader, if you know the inn I mean — the jolly inn at 
Wasdale Head. 

No, whether from the point of view of business or 
pleasure, worldly wisdom or spiritual satisfaction, there 
is nothing to be said in our defence. All that we can 
say for lying in bed is what Foote — I think it was 
Foote — said about the rum. "I went into a public- 
house," he said, "and heard one man call for some rum 



1 62 



ON EARLY RISING 



because he was hot, and another call for some rum 
because he was cold. Then I called for some rum 
because I liked it," We sluggards had better make the 
same clean breast of the business. We lie in bed be- 
cause we like it. Just that. Nothing more. We like 
it. We claim no virtue, ask no indulgence, accept 
with humility the rebukes of the strenuous. 

As for me, I have a licence — nay, I have more; I 
have a duty. It is my duty to lie in bed o' mornings 
until the day is well aired. For I burn the midnight 
oil, and the early blackbird — the first of our choir to 
awake — has often saluted me on my way home. There- 
fore I lie in bed in the morning looking at the ceiling 
and listening to the sounds of the busy world with- 
out a twinge of conscience. If you were listening, you 
would hear me laugh softly to myself as I give the 
pillow another shake and thank providence for having 
given me a job that enables me to enjoy the privileges 
of the sluggard without incurring the odium that he so 
richly deserves. 










J^'c^^: 


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fe^\ 


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w 


n\i'? 


|fr^\l 


^U^M'i 


1 


ft 


'M|^ 


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Ir 


^~"y' 




iww 



ON BEING KNOWN 



I WENT into a tailor's in the West End the other 
day to order some clothes. My shadow rarely darkens 
a tailor's door and this tailor's door it had never 
darkened before. I was surprised therefore when, 
after the preliminaries of measurement were finished, 
the attendant, in reply to a question about a deposit, 
said: "No deposit is necessary. The name is good 
enough." I confess I felt the compliment as an 
agreeable shock. The request for a deposit always 
jars on me. I know that "business is business" and 
that in this wilderness of London it is no dishonour 
to be unknown and no discredit to be formally dis- 
credited; but yet . . . And here was a man I had 
never seen before and who had never seen me who 
was prepared to execute my order without any sordid 
assurances of character on my side — simply on my 

163 



i64 ON BEING KNOWN 

name. Such a tribute needed some recognition. 
"It will save trouble," said I, "if I pay the account 
now." And I did so. I fancy the action was a 
little childish, but I couldn't help it. I really couldn't. 
I simply had to do something civil and this was the 
only civil thing that occurred to me. 

And then I went out of the shop feeling that I had 
come suddenly into an unexpected and pleasing in- 
heritance. I knew now something of the emotion 
of Mr. Sholes, the eminent author — 

Whenever down Fleet Street he strolls 

The policemen look hurriedly up 
And say, "There's the great Mr. Sholes, 

Who writes such delectable gup." 

I might not be able to write such delectable gup 
as Mr. Sholes, but I could write gup good enough 
to make that fellow in the shop trust me for a six 
guinea suit. I did not observe that the policeman 
took any particular notice of me as I passed along. 
But — "Give me time," said I, addressing the shade 
of Mr. Sholes. "Give me time. I have made a 
start in the handicap of the famous. I am known 
to that excellent shopman. I may yet be known 
(favourably and admiringly) to the police. I may 
yet walk the Strand with a nimbus that will challenge 
Mr. Horatio Bottomley and Mr. Pemberton Billing 
and the illustrious great. I may yet have the agree- 
able consciousness that heads are turning in my 
direction, and that the habitual Londoner is saying 
to his country cousin, 'That, my dear Jane, is the emi- 



ON BEING KNOWN 165 

nent Mr. Alpha of the Plough who writes those articles 
in The Star. . . . Give me time, Mr. Sholes. Give 
me time." 

But as I walked on and as that momentary flash 
of the limelight faded from me I became less confident 
that I wanted to live in it. I became sensible of the 
pleasures of obscurity. I strolled along untroubled by 
the curious and enjoyed the pageant of the pavement, 
the display of dress, the diversity of faces, the play of 
light in the eyes, the incidents of the streets. I paused 
in front of shops and fell into a reverie before the 
window of the incomparable Mr. Bumpus — the win- 
dow of stately books in noble bindings. I was sub- 
merged in the tide of the common life and felt the 
enfranchisement of the obscure. I could walk which 
way I pleased and no one would remark me; pause 
when I liked and be unobserved. But — why, here is 
Lord French of Ypres coming along. See how heads 
are turning and fingers are pointing and tongues are 
wagging — "That, my dear Jane . . ." What a nui- 
sance this limelight must be! 

And if you are really conspicuous you cannot trust 
yourself out of doors — unless you have the courage 
of John Burns, who does not care two pins who sees 
him or talks about him. The King, poor man, could 
no more walk along this pavement as I am doing, 
rubbing shoulders with the people and enjoying the 
comedy of life, than he could write to the newspapers, 
or address a crowd from the plinth of the Nelson 
Monument, or go to a booking-office and take a ticket 
for the Tube, or into an A.B.C. shop and ask for a 



i66 ON BEING KNOWN 

cup of tea, or any of the thousand and one things that 
I am at liberty to do and enjoy doing without let or 
hindrance, comment or disturbance. He is the pris- 
oner of publicity. He is pursued by the limelight, as 
the fleeing soul of the poet was pursued by the hound 
of heaven. He can't look in Bumpus's. He can't go 
on to an allotment and dig undisturbed. You cannot 
have limelight playing about an allotment. In fact, 
the more one thinks of it the more impoverished his 
life seems, and so in a lesser degree with all the emi- 
nent people who are pursued by the photographer, 
mobbed in the streets, fawned on by their friends, slan- 
dered by their enemies, exalted or defamed in the Press, 
and dissected in every club smoking-room and bar par- 
lour. 

But, you will say, think of the glory of having your 
name handed down to posterity. It is a very ques- 
tionable privilege. I am not much concerned about 
posterity. I respect it, as Wordsworth respected it. 
"What has posterity done for me that I should con- 
sider it?" some one said to him, and he replied, "No, 
but the past has done much for you." It was a just 
reminder of our obligations. But it is a lean ambi- 
tion to pose for posterity. I cannot thrill to the vision 
of the trumpeter Fame blowing my name down the 
corridors of time while I sleep on unheeding in 

My patrimony of a little mould 
And entail of four planks. 

I am not warmed by the idea of a marble image stand- 
ing with outstretched arm in the Abbey or sitting on 



ON BEING KNOWN 



167 



a horse for ever in the streets, wet or fine, or perched 
up on a towering column to be a convenience to vagrant 
birds. If fame is often a nuisance to the living, it is 
only an empty echo for the dead. Spare me marble 
trappings, good friends, and give me the peace of for- 
getfulness. 

By the time I had reached the end of my walk and 
iiiy ruminations, I felt less cordial towards that man 
in the shop. I wished, on the whole, that he had 
asked for the deposit. 





ON A MAP OF THE OBERLAND 

I WAS rummaging among my books this morning when 
I came across Frey's map of the Bernese Oberland, 
and forthwith forgot the object of my search in the 
presence of this exhilarating discovery. Mr. Chester- 
ton, I think, once described how he evoked the emo- 
tions of a holiday by calling a cab, piling it up with 
luggage, and driving to the station. Then, having 
had his sensation, he drove home again. It seemed 
to me rather a poor way of taking an imaginative 
holiday. One might as well heat an empty oven in 
order to imagine a feast. The true medium of the 
spiritual holiday Is the map. That is the magic carpet 
that whisks you away from this sodden earth and 
unhappy present to sunny lands and serener days. 
i68 



ON A MAP OF THE OBERLAND 169 

There are times when books offer no escape from 
the burden of things, when as Mr. Biglow says 

I'm as unsoshul as a stone, 

And kind o' suffercate to be alone; 

but there are no circumstances in which a map will 
not do the trick. I do not care whether it is a map 
of the known or the unknown, the visited or the 
unvisited, the real or the fanciful. It was the jolly 
map which Stevenson invented in an idle hour which 
became the seed of "Treasure Island." That is how 
a map stimulated his fancy and sent it out on a career 
of immortal adventure. And though you have not 
Stevenson's genius for describing the adventure, that 
is what a map will do for you if you have a spark 
of the boy's love of romance left in your soul. It is 
the "magic casement" of the poet. I have never 
crossed the Atlantic in the flesh, but, lord, what 
spiritual adventures I have had with maps in the en- 
chanted world on the other side ! I have sailed with 
Drake in Nombre de Dios Bay, and navigated the grim 
straits with Magellan, and lived with the Incas of 
Peru and the bloody Pizarro, and gone up the broad 
bosom of the Amazon into fathomless forests, and 
sailed through the Golden Gates on golden afternoons, 
and stood with Cortes "silent upon a peak in Darien." 
I know the Shenandoah Valley far better than I know 
Wimbledon Common, and have fought over every inch 
of it by the side of Stonewall Jackson, just as I have 
lived in the mazes of the Wilderness with Grant 
and Lee, 



I70 ON A MAP OF THE OBERLAND 

Do not tell me I have never been to these places 
and a thousand others like them. I swear that I have. 
I have traversed them all in the kingdom of the 
mind, and if you will give me a map and a rainy 
day (like this) I will go on a holiday more en- 
trancing than any that Mr. Cook ever planned. It 
is not taking tickets that makes the traveller. I have 
known people who have gone round the world with- 
out seeing anything, while Thoreau could stay in his 
back garden and entertain the universe. 

But if maps of the unvisited earth have the magic 
of romance in them, maps of the places you have 
known have a fascination, no less rich and deep. They, 
too, take you out on a holiday, but it is a holiday of 
memory and not of the imagination. You are back 
with yourself in other days and in other places and 
with other friends. You may tell me that this was 
a dreary, rainy morning, sir, and that I spent it look- 
ing out over the dismal valley and the sad cornfields 
with their stricken crops. Nothing of the sort. I 
spent it in the Bernese Oberland, with an incom- 
parable companion. Three weeks I put in, sir, three 
weeks on the glaciers. See, there, on this glorious 
map of Frey's, is Mvirren, from whence we started. In 
front is the mighty snow mass of the Jungfrau, the 
Monch and the Eiger, shutting out the glacier solitudes 
whither we are bound. 

There goes our track up the ravine to Obersteinberg 
and there is the Miitthorn hut, standing on the bit 
of barren rock that sticks out from the great ice- 
billows of the Tschingelhorn glacier. Do you re- 



ON A MAP OF THE OBERLAND 171 

member, companion of mine, the mighty bowls of 
steaming tea we drank when we reached that haven 
of refuge? And do you remember our start from 
the hut at two o'clock in the morning, roped with 
our guide and with our lanterns lit — and the silence 
of our march over the snow and ice and beneath the 
glittering stars, and the hollow boom of distant ava- 
lanches, and the breaking of the wondrous dawn over 
the ice-fields, and the unforgettable view as we reached 
the ridge of the Petersgrat and saw across the Rhone 
Valley the great mountain masses beyond — the Weiss- 
horn, the Matterhorn, Mont Blanc, and the rest — 
touched to an unearthly beauty by the flush of the 
new risen sun? And the scramble up the Tschingel- 
horn, and the long grind down the ice-slopes and the 
moraine to the seclusion of the Lotschenthal ? And 
then the days that followed in the great ice region 
behind the Jungfrau; the long, silent marches over 
pathless snows and by yawning crevasses, the struggle 
up peaks in the dawn, and the nights in the huts, 
sometimes with other climbers who blew in across 
the snows from some remote adventure, sometimes 
alone as in that tiny hut on the Finsteraarhorn, where 
we paid three and a half francs for a bunch of wood 
to boil our kettle? 

There is the Oberaar hut standing on the ledge of 
a dizzy precipice. Do you remember the sunset 
we saw from thence, when out of the general gloom 
of the conquering night one beam from the vanished 
sun caught the summit of the Dom and made it gleam 
like a palace in the heavens or like the towers of the 



172 ON A MAP OF THE OBERLAND 

radiant city that Christian saw across the dark river? 
And there at the end of the journey is the great 
glacier that leaps down, seven thousand feet, between 
the Schreckhorn and the Wetterhorn, to the gracious 
valley of Grindelwald. How innocent it looks on this 
map, but what a day of gathering menace was that 
when we got caught between the impassable crevasses, 
and night came on and the rain came down and . . . 
But let the magic carpet hasten slowly here. . . . 

It was still dark when Heinrich of the Looking 
Glass leapt up from our bed of hay in the Dolfuss 
hut, lit the candle and began to prepare the break- 
fast. Outside the rain came down in torrents and 
the clouds hung thick and low over glacier and peaks. 
Our early start for the Gleckstein hut was thwarted. 
Night turned to dawn and dawn to day, and still the 
rain pelted down on that vast solitude of rock and 
ice. Then the crest of the Finsteraarhorn appeared 
through a rent in the clouds, patches of blue broke 
up the grey menace of the sky, the rain ceased. 
Otmar and Heinrich hastily washed the iron cups and 
plates and swept the floor of the hut, and then, should- 
ering our rucksacks and closing the door of the empty 
hut, we scrambled down the rocks to the glacier. 

It was 8.15 and the guidebooks said it was a seven 
hours* journey to the Gleckstein. That seemed to 
leave ample margin; but do not "trust guidebooks in 
a season of drought when the crevasses are open. 

This wisdom, however, came later. All through 
the morning we made excellent progress. The sun 
shone, the clouds hung lightly about the peaks, the 



ON A MAP OF THE OBERLAND 173 

ice was in excellent condition. Heinrich, who brought 
up the rear, occasionally broke into song. Now, when 
Heinrich sings you know that all is well. When he 
whistles you are in a tight place. For the rest he is 
silent. Otmar, his brother, is less communicative. He 
goes on ahead silently under all conditions, skirting 
crevasses, testing snow bridges to see if they will 
bear, occasionally pausing to consult his maps. Once 
only did he burst into song that day — but of that 
later. Otmar is an autocrat on the ice or the rocks. 
In the hut he will make your tea and oil your boots 
and help Heinrich to wash your cups and sweep the 
floor. But out in the open he is your master. If 
you ask him inconvenient questions he does not hear. 
If you suggest a second breakfast before it is due his 
silence as he pounds forward ahead humiliates you. 
If your pace slackens there is a rebuke in the taut in- 
sistence of the rope. 

It was eleven when we halted for our cold tea and 
sardines (white wine for Otmar and Heinrich). The 
pause gave Heinrich an opportunity of taking out 
his pocket looking-glass and touching up his mous- 
tache ends and giving a flick to his eye-brows. Hein- 
rich is as big and brawny as an ox, but he has the 
soul of a dandy. 

It had been easy going on the furrowed face of 
the ice, but when we came to the snow slope that 
leads to the Lauteraar saddle our pace slackened. The 
snow was soft, and we sank at each step up to our 
shins. Otmar eased the passage up the slope by zig- 
zagging, but it was one o'clock when we came face 



174 ON A MAP OF THE OBERLAND 

to face with the wall of snow, flanked by walls of 
rock which form the "saddle." Otmar led my com- 
panion over the rocks ; but decided that Heinrich should 
bring me up the snow face. Step cutting is slow work, 
and though Otmar, having reached the top of the sad- 
dle, threw down a second rope, which Heinrich lashed 
round his waist, it was two o'clock before that terrible 
wall was surmounted, and we could look down the 
great glacier that plunges seven thousand feet down 
into the hollow where Grindelwald lay with its red 
roofs and pleasant pastures, its hotels and its tourists. 

We had taken nearly six hours to surmount the pass ; 
but we seemed, nevertheless, to have the day well 
in hand. Four thousand feet down on a spur of the 
Wetterhorn we could see the slate roof of the Gleck- 
stein hut. It seemed an easy walk over the glacier, 
but in these vast solitudes of ice and snow and rock 
vision is deceptive. The distance seems incredibly near, 
for the familiar measurements of the eye are want- 
ing. 

The weather had changed again. Clouds had settled 
on the mighty cliffs of the Schreckhorn on our left and 
the Wetterhorn on our right. Mist was rolling over 
the pass; rain began to fall. We cut short our lunch 
(cold tea, cold veal, bread and jam), and began our 
descent, making a wide detour of the glacier to the 
right in the direction of the Wetterhorn. We de- 
scended a rocky precipice that cleaves the glacier, crossed 
an ice slope on which Otmar had to cut steps, and 
came in view of Grindelwald, lying like a picture 
postcard far down below — so immediately below that it 




Wherever he turned he was baulked. 



176 ON A MAP OF THE OBERLAND 

seemed that one might fling a stone down into its midst. 

At half-past three it began to dawn on me that 
things were not going well. Otmar had, during the 
past three weeks, been the most skilful of guides over 
most of the great glacier passes of the Oberland and 
up many a peak; but so far we had seen nothing like 
the condition of the Grindelwaldfirn. The appalling 
slope of this great sea of ice makes a descent in normal 
times a task of difficulty. But this year the long 
drought had left open all the yawning crevasses with 
which it is seamed and its perils were infinitely in- 
creased. 

Again and again Otmar sought a way out of the 
maze, taking us across perilous snow bridges and cut- 
ting steps on knife edges of ice where one looked down 
the glittering slope on one side and into the merciless 
green-blue depths of the crevasse on the other. But 
wherever he turned he was baulked. Always the 
path led to some vast fissure which could be neither 
leapt nor bridged. Once we seemed to have escaped 
and glissaded swiftly down. Then the slope got steeper 
and we walked — steeper and Otmar began cutting 
steps in the ice — steeper and Otmar paused and looked 
down the leap of the glacier. We stood silent for 
his verdict. "It will not go." We turned on the 
rope without a word, and began remounting our steps. 

It was half-past four. The mist was thickening, the 
rain falling steadily. Below, the red roofs and green 
pastures of Grindelwald gleamed in the sunlight of 
the valley. Nearer, the slate roof of the Gleckstein 
on its spur of rock was still visible. Two hours before 



ON A MAP OF THE OBERLAND 177 

it had seemed but a step to either. Now they seemed 
to have receded to another hemisphere. 

For the first time there flashed through the mind 
the thought that possibly we should not reach the hut 
after all. A night on the glacier, or rather on the 
dark ridges of the Wetterhorn! A wet night too. 

The same thought was working in Otmar's mind. 
No word came from him, no hint that he was con- 
cerned. But the whole bearing of the man was 
changed. In the long hours of the morning he had 
led us listlessly and silently; now he was like a hound 
on the trail. The tug of the rope became more in- 
sistent. He made us face difficulties that he had 
skirted before; took us on to snow bridges that made 
the mind reel; slashed steps with his ice axe with a 
swift haste that spoke in every stroke of the coming 
night. Once I failed to take a tricky snow ridge 
that came to a point between two crevasses, slipped 
back, and found myself in the crevasse, with my feet 
dancing upon nothing. The rope held. Otmar hauled 
me out without a word, and we resumed our march. 

Heinrich had been unroped earlier and sent to pros- 
pect from above for a possible way out. We followed 
at his call, but he led us into new mazes, down into 
a great cavern in the glacier, where we passed over 
the ruined walls and buttresses of an ice cathedral, 
emerging on the surface of the glacier again, only to 
find ourselves once more checked by impassable gulfs. 

It was now half-past five. We had been three and 
a half hours in vainly attempting to find a way down 
the ice. The mist had come thick upon us. The 



178 ON A MAP OF THE OBERLAND 

peaks were blotted out, Grindelwald was blotted out; 
the hut was no longer visible. Only an hour and a 
half of light remained, and the whole problem was 
still unsolved. The possibility of a night on the ice 
or the rocks began to approach the sphere of certainty. 
My strength was giving out, and I slipped again and 
again in the ice steps. A kind of dull resignation had 
taken possession of the mind. One went forward in a 
stupor, responsive to the tug of the rope, but indiffer- 
ent to all else. 

Otmar was now really concerned. He came from 
a valley south of the Rhone, and was unfamiliar with 
this pass; but he is of a great strain of Alpine guides, 
is proud of his achievements — he had led in the first 
ascent of the Zmutt ridge of the Matterhorn that year 
— and to be benighted on a glacier would have been a 
deadly blow to his pride. 

He unroped himself, and dashed away in the direc- 
tion of the ridge of the Wetterhorn that plunged down 
on our right. We watched him skimming across crev- 
asses, pausing here and there to slash a step in the ice 
for foothold, balancing himself on icy ridges and van- 
ishing into a couloir of the mountain — first depositing 
his rucksack on the rocks to await his return. Five 
minutes passed — ten. Heinrich startled the silence 
with an halloo — no answer. A quarter of an hour — 
then, from far below, a faint cry came. 

"It will go," said Heinrich, "get on." We hurried 
across the intervening ice, and met Otmar returning 
like a cat up the rocks. Down that narrow slit in the 
mountain we descended with headlong speed. There 



ON A MAP OF THE OBERLAND 179 

were drops of thirty and fifty feet, slabs of rock to 
cross with meticulous foot and hand hold, passages of 
loose rock where a careless move would have sent great 
stones thundering on the heads of those before. Once 
Heinrich lowered me like a bale of goods down a 
smooth-faced precipice of fifty feet. Once he cried: 
"Quick: it is dangerous," and looking up at the crest 
of the Wetterhorn I saw a huge block of ice poised 
perilously above our downward path. 

The night was now upon us. We were wet to the 
skin. A thunderstorm of exceptional violence added 
to the grimness of the setting. But we were down 
the ridge at last. We raced across a narrow tongue 
of the glacier and were safe on the spur of rocks 
where we knew the Gleckstein hut to be. But there 
was no light to guide us. We scrambled breathlessly 
over boulders and across torrents from the Wetterhorn, 
each of us hardly visibly to the other in the thickening 
mist, save when the blaze of lightning flashed the scene 
into sudden and spectral clearness. At last we struck 
a rough mountain path, and five minutes later we lifted 
the latch of the hut. 

"What is the time, Heinrich?" 

"Half-past eight." 

"What would you have done, Otmar, if we had 
been benighted?" 

Otmar did not hear. But as he got the wood and 
made the fire, and emptied the rucksacks of our pro- 
visions, he began to sing in a pleasant tenor voice. 
And Heinrich joined in with his full bass. 

And presently, stripped of our wet clothes and 



i8o ON A MAP OF THE OBERLAND 

wrapped in blankets, we sat down to a glorious meal 
of steaming tea — in an iron teapot as large as a pail 
— tongue, soup, potted chicken, and jam, 

"That was a narrow escape from a night on the 
mountains," I said. 

"It is a very foolish glacier," said Heinrich. 

Otmar said nothing. 

Five hours later Otmar woke us from our bed of 
hay. 

"It is fine," he said. "The Wetterhorn will go." 

As I look up it is still raining and the sad sheaves 
still stand in the sodden fields. But I have been a 
journey. I have had three weeks in the Oberland 
— three weeks of summer days with a world at peace, 
the world that seems like a dream we once had, so 
remote has it become and so incredible. I roll up my 
magic carpet and bless the man who invented maps for 
the solace of men. 



X\UA/>.^ 




?5i%t 




ON A TALK IN A BUS 

I JUMPED on to a bus in Fleet Street the other evening 
and took a seat against the door. Opposite me sat 
a young woman in a conductor's dress, who carried 
on a lively conversation with the woman conductor 
in charge of the bus. There were the usual criticisms 
of the habits and wickedness of passengers, and then 
the conductor inside asked the other at the door how 
"Flo" was getting on at the job and whether she was 
"sticking it out." 

"Pretty girl, ain't she?" she said. 

"Well, I can't see where the pretty comes in," re- 
plied the other. 

"Have you seen her when she has her hat off? 
She's pretty then." 

"Can't see what difference that would make." 

"She's got nice eyes." 

"Never see anything particular about her eyes." 

"Well, she's a nice kid, anyway." 

"Yes, she's a nice kid all right, but I can't see the 

pretty about her — not a little bit. Pretty!" She 

tossed her head and looked indignant, almost hurt, as 

though she had received some secret personal affront. 

i8i 



i82 ON A TALK IN A 'BUS 

I do not think she had. It was more probable that 
on a subject about which she felt deeply she had suf- 
fered a painful shock. She liked "Flo," thought her 
"a nice kid," but mere personal affection could not be 
permitted to compromise the stern truth about a sa- 
cred subject like "prettiness." 

The little incident interested me because it illus- 
trated one of the great differences between the sexes. 
You have only to try to turn that conversation into 
masculine terms to see how wide that difference is. 
Tom and Bill might have a hundred things to say 
about Jack. They might agree that he was a liar 
or an honest chap, that he drank too much or didn't 
drink enough, that he was mean or generous; but 
there is one thing it would never occur to them to 
discuss. It would never occur to them to discuss 
his looks, to talk about his eyes, to consider whether 
he was more beautiful with or without his hat. They 
might say that he looked merry or miserable, sulky 
or pleasant, but that would have reference to Jack's 
character and moral aptitudes and not to any aesthetic 
consideration. 

But this conversation about "Flo" was entirely 
aesthetic. The question of her moral traits only came 
in as a means of dodging the main issue. The main 
issue was whether she was pretty, and it was evidently 
a very important issue indeed. 

It is this interest of women in their own sex as 
works of art that distinguishes them from men. Men 
have no interest in their own sex in that sense. Sit 
on a bus and see what interests the male passenger. 



ON A TALK IN A 'BUS 183 

It is not his fellow-males. He does not sit and study 
their clothes, and make mental notes on their claims 
to beauty. If he is interested in his fellow-passengers 
at all it is the other sex that appeals to him. His own 
sex has no pictorial attraction for him. But a 
woman is interested in women and women only. It 
is their clothes that her eye wanders over with mild 
envy or disapproval. You almost hear her mind re- 
cording the price of that muff, those furs, the hat 
and the boots. At the end of her survey you feel 
that she knows what everything cost, what are the 
wearer's ambitions, social status, place of residence — 
in fact, all about her. And she is equally concerned 
about her physical qualities. She will watch a pretty 
face with open admiration, and pay it the same sort 
of tribute that she would pay to a beautiful picture or 
any other work of art. "What a pretty woman!" 
"What lovely hair that girl has!" 

This is not a peculiarity of our own people alone. 
Not long ago I went with two French officers over a 
great munitions factory near Paris. We were accom- 
panied by a clever little woman who was secretary to 
the head of one of the departments, and who acted as 
guide. We went through great shops where thou- 
sands of women were working, and as we passed along 
I noticed that every eye fell on the little woman. I 
became so interested in this human fact that I forgot 
to give my attention to the machinery. And to be 
honest I am always ready to turn away from machin- 
ery, which to me is much less interesting than human 
nature. I think I can say with truth that not one 



i84 ON A TALK IN A 'BUS 

woman in all those thousands failed to scan our guide 
or bothered to give one glance at the officers. Yet 
they were fine fellows and obviously important persons, > 
while the guide was common-place in appearance and 
quite plainly dressed. 

There are of course women who dress and comport 
themselves with an eye to male admiration as well 
as female envy and appreciation. They are the women 
of the bold eye, which is not the same thing as the 
brave eye. But taking women in the lump, it is their 
own sex they are interested in. They devote enor- 
mous attention to dress, but they do so for each other's 
enjoyment. They have a passion for personal beauty, 
but it is the personal beauty of their own sex that ap- 
peals to them. No doubt there is a sexual motive un- 
derlying this fact. It is the motive expressed in " 'My 
face is my fortune, sir,' she said." The desire to be 
pretty is ultimately the desire to be matrimonially 
fortunate. Bill's success in life has no relation to his 
looks. He may be as ugly as sin, but if he has strong 
arms, a good digestion, and a sound mind he will do 
as well as another. Some of the plainest men in Eng- 
land have sat on the Woolsack. Plain women, it is true, 
have come to eminence. Catherine Sedley, the mistress 
of James II., is a case in point. She herself was puzzled 
to explain her influence over that sour fanatic-libertine, 
for as, she said, "I have no beauty and he has not the 
faculty to appreciate my intelligence." But the ex- 
ceptions prove the rule. Prettiness is the woman's com- 
modity. It is the badge of her servitude. And behind 
that little conversation in the bus about "Flo's" claims 



ON A TALK IN A 'BUS 185 

to prettiness was a very practical, though unformed, 
consideration of her prospects in life. 

What will be the effect of the war upon "Flo" 
and her kind? She has found that she has an in- 
dependent, non-sexual importance to society, that she 
has a career which has nothing to do with prettiness, 
that she can win her bread with her mental and physical 
faculties as easily as a man. She has tasted freedom 
and discovered herself. The discovery will give her 
a new independence of outlook, a more self-confident 
view of her place in society, a greater respect for the 
hard practical things of life. She will still desire to 
be pretty and to have the admiration of her sex, but 
the desire will have a sounder foundation than in the 
past. It will no longer be her career. It will be her 
ornament. It will decorate the fact that she can run 
a bus as well as a man. 





ON VIRTUES THAT DON'T COUNT 



I OFTEN think that when we go down into the Valley 
of Jehoshaphat we shall all be greatly astonished at 
the credit and debit items we shall find against our 
names in the ledger of our life. We shall discover 
that many of the virtues which we thought would give 
us a thumping credit balance have not been recorded 
at all, and that some of our failings have by the magic 
of celestial book-keeping been entered on the credit side. 
The fact is that our virtues are often no virtues at all. 
They may even only be vices, seen in reverse. 

Take Smithson Spinks — everyone knows the Smith- 
son Spinks type. What a reputation for generosity the 
fellow has. What a grandeur of giving he exhales. 
How noble his scorn for mean fellows. How royal the 
flash of his hand to his pocket if you are getting up 
a testimonial to this man, or a fund for that object, 
or want a loan yourself. No one hesitates to ask 
i86 



ON VIRTUES THAT DON'T COUNT 187 




Smfthson Spinks for anything. He likes to be asked. 
He would be hurt if he were not asked. And yet if 
you track Smithson Spinks's generosity to its source 
you find that it is only pride turned inside out. The 
true motive of his giving is not love of his fellows, 
but love of himself and the vanity of a mind that 
wants the admiration and envy of others. You see the 
reverse of the shield at home, where the real Smithson 
Spinks is discovered as a stingy fellow, who grumbles 
when the boys want new boots and who leaves his 
wife to struggle perpetually with a load of debt and 
an empty purse, while he plays the part of the large- 
hearted gentleman abroad. He believes in his own 
fiction, but when he looks in the ledger he will have a 
painful shock. He will turn to the credit side, expect- 
ing to find Generosity written in large and golden 



i88 ON VIRTUES THAT DON'T COUNT 

letters, and he will probably find instead Vanity 
in plain black on the debit side. 

And I — let us say that I flatter myself on being a 
truthful person. But am I? What will the ledger 
say? I have a dreadful suspicion that it may put my 
truthfulness down to the compulsion of a tremulous 
nerve. I may — who knows? — only be truthful be- 
cause I haven't courage enough for dissimulation. It 
may not be a positive moral virtue at all, but only the 
moral reflection of a timorous spirit. It needs great 
courage to tell a lie which you have got to face out. 
I could no more do it than I could dance on the point 
of a needle. 

Consider the courage of that monumental liar Ar- 
thur Orton — the sheer unflinching audacity with which 
he challenged the truth, facing Tichborne's own 
mother with his impudent tale of being her son, facing 
judges and juries, going into witness-boxes with his 
web of outrageous inventions, keeping a stiff lip before 
the devastating rain of exposure. A ruffian, of course, 
a thick-skinned ruffian, but what courage! 

Now there may be a potential Arthur Orton in 
me, but he has never had a chance. I have no gift 
of dissimulation. If I tried it I should flounder like 
a boy on his first pair of skates. I could not bluff a 
rabbit. No one would believe me if I told him a lie. 
My eye would return a verdict of guilty against me 
on the spot, and my tongue would refuse its office. 
And therein is the worm that eats at my self-respect. 
May not my obedience to the ten commandments be 
only due to my fear of the eleventh commandment — 



ON VIRTUES THAT DON'T COUNT 189 

that cynical rescript which runs, "Thou shalt not be 
found out"? I hope it is not so, but I must prepare 
myself for the revelations of the ledger in the Valley 
of Jehoshaphat. For they will be as candid about me 
and you as about Smithson Spinks. 

You can never be absolutely sure of a man's moral 
nature until you have shipped him, figuratively, 

. . . somewheres East of Suez 
Where the best is like the worst, 
Where there aren't no ten commandments, 
And a man can raise a thirst — 

until in fact you have got him away from his defences, 
liberated him from the conventions and respectabilities 
that encompass him with minatory fingers and vigilant 
eyes and left him to the uncontrolled governance of 
himself. Then it will be found whether the virtues 
are diamonds or paste — whether they spring out of the 
ten commandments or out of the eleventh. The lord 
Angelo in "Measure for -Measure" passed for a strict 
and saintly person — and I have no doubt believed him- 
self to be a strict and saintly person — so long as he 
was under control, but when the Duke's back was 
turned the libertine appeared. And note that subtle 
touch of Shakespeare's. Angelo was not an ordinary 
libertine. He passed for a saint because he could not 
be tempted by vice, but only by virtue. Hear him com- 
muning with himself when Isabella has gone: — 

. . . What is't I dream on? 

O cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint. 

With saints dost bait thy hook! Most dangerous 



I90 ON VIRTUES THAT DON'T COUNT 

Is that temptation that doth goad us on 
To sin in loving virtue ; never could the strumpet, 
With all her double vigour, art and nature 
Once stir my temper ; but this virtuous maid 
Subdues me quite. 

His safntliness revolted from vice, but his love of virtue 
opened the floodgates of viciousness. What a paradox 
is man. I think I have known more than one lord 
Angelo whose virtue rested on nothing better than a 
fastidious taste, or an absence of appetite. 

That is certainly the case with many people who 
have the quality of sobriety. Abraham Lincoln, him- 
self a total abstainer, once got into great trouble for 
saying so. He was addressing a temperance meeting 
at a Presbyterian church, and said: "In my judgment 
such of us as have never fallen victims (to drink) have 
been spared more from the absence of appetite than 
from any mental or moral superiority over those who 
have fallen." It seemed a reasonable thing to say, but 
it shocked the stern teetotalers present. "It's a shame," 
said one, "that he should be permitted to abuse us so 
in the house of the Lord." They did not like to feel 
that they were not more virtuous than men who drank 
and even got drunk. They expected to have a large 
credit entry for not tippling. Like Malvolio, they 
mixed up virtue with "cakes and ale," If you in- 
dulged in them you were vicious, and if you abstained 
from them you were virtuous. 

It was a beautifully simple moral code, but virtue 
is not so easily catalogued. It is not a negative thing, 
but a positive thing. It is not measured by its anti- 
pathies but by its sympathies. Its manifestations an 



ON VIRTUES THAT DON'T COUNT 191 

many, but its root is one, and its names are "truth 
and justice" which even the Prayer Book puts before 
"religion and piety." 

And to return to the Lincoln formula, if you have 
no taste for tippling what virtue is there in not tip- 
pling? The virtue is often with the tippler. I knew 
a man who died of drink, and whose life nevertheless 
had been an heroic struggle with his enemy. He was 
always falling, but he never ceased fighting. And it 
is the fighting, I think, he will find recorded in the 
ledger — greatly to his surprise, for he had the most 
modest opinion of his merits and a deep sense of his 
moral infirmity. 

It is no more virtuous for some men not to get 
drunk than it is for a Rothschild not to put his hand 
in his neighbour's pocket in order to steal half a crown. 
He doesn't need a half-crown, and there is no virtue 
in not stealing what you don't want. That was what 
was wrong with the "Northern Farmer's" philosophy 
that those who had money were the best: — 

'Tis'n them as 'as munny as breaks into 'ouses an' steals, 
Them as 'as coats to their backs an' taakes their regular 

meals. 
Noa, but it's them as niver knaws wheer a meal's to be 

'ad— 
Taake my word for it, Sammy, the poor in a loomp is bad. 

It was a creed of virtue which looked at the fact and 
not at the temptation. He will have found a much 
more complex system of book-keeping where he has 
gone. I imagine him standing painfully puzzled at 
the sort of accounts which he will find made up in 
the "valley of decision." 




ON HATE AND THE SOLDIER 



"And when are you going back to fight those vermin 
again?" asked the man in the corner. 

"D'ye mean ole Fritz?" said the soldier. 

"I mean those Huns," said the other, 

"Oh, there's nothing wrong with ole Fritz," replied 
the soldier. "He can't help hisself. He's shoved 
out there in the mud to fight same as we are, and 
he does the job same as we do. But he'd jolly well 
like to chuck the business and go home. Course he 
would. Stands to reason. Anybody would." 

It was a disappointing reply to the man in the 
corner, who obviously felt that the other was wanting 
in the first essential of a soldier — a personal hatred 
of the individual enemy. This man clearly did not 
hate the enemy. Yet if anyone was entitled to hate 
him he had abundant reason. He had been out 
since August 1914, had been wounded four times, 
buried by shell explosion three times, and gassed twice. 
It was two years since he had been home on leave, 
192 



ON HATE AND THE SOLDIER 193 

and now he was on his way to see his people in the 
West of England. He talked about his experiences 
with the calm dispassionateness of one describing 
commonplace things, quite uncomplainingly, very sen- 
sibly, and without the least trace of egotism. He'd 
been in a horrible spot lately, "reg'lar death-trap," at 

G . "Nobody can hold it," he said. "We take 

it when we like, and Fritz, he takes it when he likes. 
That's all there is about it," It was noticeable that he 
always spoke of the enemy as "Fritz," and always 
without any appearance of personal animus. 

I do not record the incident as unusual. I record 
it as usual. No one who has had much intercourse 
with soldiers at the front, whether rank or file, will 
dispute this. In any circumstance, it is hard to 
nurse a passion at white heat over a term of years, 
and it is impossible to do so when you see the ugly 
business of war at close quarters. You have to be 
comfortably at home to really enjoy the luxury of 
hate. I have heard more bitter things from the lips 
of clergymen and seen more bitter things from the 
pen of so-called comic journalists than I have heard 
from the lips of soldiers, and in that admirable collec- 
tion of utterances of hate in Germany, made by Mr. 
William Archer, it will be found that the barbaric 
things generally come from pulpits or the studies of be- 
spectacled professors. 

The soldier is too near the foul business, sees all the 
misery and suffering too close, to be consumed with 
hate. If he could envy the other fellow he would 
stand a better chance of hating him. But he sees 



194 ON HATE AND THE SOLDIER 

that Fritz is in no better plight than himself. He is 
living in the mud among the rats too, and is just as 
helpless an atom in the machine of war as himself. 
He sees his body, torn and disgusting, cumbering the 
battlefield, or hanging limp and horrible on the 
barbed wire in No Man's Land. It is Fritz's turn 
to-day; it may be his own to-morrow. And the 
baser feeling gives place to a general compassion. The 
chord of a common humanity is struck, and if he does 
not actually love his enemy he ceases to hate him. 

But the man in the corner of the carriage need 
have no fear that this means that the soldier opposite 
is a less valuable fighting man in consequence. The 
idea that you must grind your teeth all the time is 
an infantile delusion. I should have much more 
confidence in that quiet, sane, undemonstrative 
soldier in the face of the enemy than I should have 
in the people who kill the enemy with their mouth, 
and prove their patriotism by the violence of their 
language. I have known many brave men who have 
given their lives heroically in this war, but I cannot 
recall one — not one — who stained his heroism with 
vulgar hate. 

The gospel of hate as the instrument of victory, 
indeed, is not the soldier's gospel at all. There have 
been few greater soldiers in history than General Lee, 
and probably no more saintly man. He fought 
literally to the last ditch, but he never ceased to 
repudiate the doctrine of hate. When a minister in 
the course of a sermon had expressed himself bitterly 
about the enemy, Lee said to him: "Doctor, there is 



ON HATE AND THE SOLDIER 195 

a good old Book which says, 'Love your enemies.' 
Do you think that your remarks this evening were 
quite in the spirit of that teaching?" And when 
one of his generals exclaimed of the enemy, "I wish 
these people were all dead," Lee answered, "How 
can you say so? Now, I wish they were all at home 
attending to their business and leaving us to do the 
same." And Lee stated his attitude generally 
when he said: "I have fought against the people 
of the North because I believed they were seeking 
to wrest from the South dearest rights. But I have 
never cherished bitter or vindictive feelings and have 
never seen the day when I did not pray for them." 

There was a striking illustration of the contrast 
between the soldier's and the civilian's attitude 
towards the enemy the other day. In the current 
issue of Punch I saw a poem by Sir Owen Seaman 
(the author of that heroic line, "I hate all Huns"), 
addressed to the "Huns," in which he said: — 

But where you have met your equals, 
Gun for gun and man for man, 

We have noticed other sequels, 
It was always you that ran. 

In the newspapers that same morning (March 5th, 
191 8) there appeared a report from Sir Douglas Haig, 
in the course of which he said: — 

Many of the hits upon our Tanks at Flesquieres were ob- 
tained by a German artillery officer who, remaining alone 
at his battery, served a field gun single-handed until killed 



196 ON HATE AND THE SOLDIER 

at his gun. The great bravery of this officer aroused the 
admiration of all ranks. 

The same chivalrous spirit breathes through the 
letters of Captain Ball, V.C., published in the memoir 
of the brilliant airman. He was little more than a 
boy when he was killed after an almost unparalleled 
career of victory in the air. He fought with a terrible 
skill, but he had no more personal animus for his 
opponent than he would have had for the bowler 
whom it was his business to hit to the boundary. In 
one of his letters to his father he said : — 

You ask me to let the devils have it when I fight. Yes, I 
always let them have all I can, but really I don't think 
them devils. I only scrap because it is my duty, but I do 
not think anything bad about the Huns. He is just a 
good chap with very little guts, trying to do his best. 
Nothing makes me feel more rotten than to see them go 
down, but you see it is either them or me, so I must do 
my best to make it a case of them. 

And the gay, healthy temper in which he played his 
part is revealed in another letter, in which he describes 
a fight that ended in mutual laughter: — 

We kept on firing until we had used up all our am- 
munition. There was nothing more to be done after that, 
so we both burst out laughing. We couldn't help it — it 
was so ridiculous. We flew side by side laughing at each 
other for a few seconds, and then we waved adieu to each 
other and went off. He was a real sport was that Hun. 

That is a pleasant picture to carry in the mind, the 
two high-spirited boys sent out to kill each other faith- 



ON HATE AND THE SOLDIER 197 

fully trying to do their duty, failing, and then riding 
through the air side by side with merry laughter at 
their mutual discomfiture and gay adieus at parting. 

And at the risk of hurting the feelings of the man 
in the corner I shall recall a letter which shows that 
even among the enemy of to-day, even among that 
worst of all military types, the German officer, there 
are those whom the miseries and horrors of war touch 
to something nobler than hate. The letter appeared 
in the Cologne Gazette early in the war and was as 
follows : — 

Perhaps you will be so good as to assist by the publica- 
tion of these lines in freeing our troops from an evil which 
they feel very strongly. I have on many occasions, when 
distributing among the men the postal packets, observed 
among them postcards on which the defeated French, Eng- 
lish and Russians were derided in a tasteless fashion. 

The impression made by these postcards on our men is 
highly noteworthy. Scarcely anybody is pleased with these 
postcards; on the contrary, every one expresses his dis- 
pleasure. 

This is natural when one considers the position. We 
know how victories are won. We also know by what tre- 
mendous sacrifices they are obtained. We see with our 
own eyes the unspeakable misery of the battlefield. We 
rejoice over our victories, but our joy is damped by the 
recollection of the sad pictures which we observe almost 
daily. 

And our enemies have in an overwhelming majority of 
cases truly not deserved to be derided in such a way. Had 
they not fought as bravely we should not have had to reg- 
ister such losses. 

Insipid, therefore, as these postcards are in themselves, 
their effect here, on the battlefields, in the presence of our 



198 ON HATE AND THE SOLDIER 

dead and wounded, is only calculated to cause disgust. 
Such postcards are as much out of place in the battlefield 
as a clown is at a funeral. Perhaps these lines may prove 
instrumental in decreasing the number of such postcards 
sent to our troops. 

I do not suppose they did. I have no doubt the 
fire-eaters at home went on fire-eating under the 
impression that that was what the men at the front 
wanted to keep up their fighting spirit. But it is 
not. There is plenty of hate in the trenches, but it 
is directed, not against the victims of war, but against 
the institution of war. That is the one ray of hope 
that shines over the dismal landscape of Europe to-day. 





ON TAKING THE CALL 



Jane came home from the theatre last night over- 
flowing with an indignation that even the beauty of 
a ride on the top of a bus in the air of these divine 
summer nights had not cooled. It was not dissatis- 
faction with the play or the performance that made 
her boil with volcanic wrath. It was the vanity of 
the insufferable actor-manager, who would insist on 
"taking the call" all the time and every time. There 
were some quite nice people in the play, it seemed, but 
the more the audience called for them the more the 
preposterous "old clo' " man of the stage came smirk- 
ing before the curtain, rubbing his fat hands and creas- 
ing his fat cheeks. "It was disgusting," said Jane. 
"The creature had been gibbering in the lime-light all 
night, and the audience were trying to level things up 
a bit by giving the interesting people a show, and this 
greedy cormorant snatched every crumb for himself. 
I hate him. He is a Hun." 

The outburst reminded me of a story I once heard 

about another actor-manager. At the end of the play 

he went on the stage and found his company bending 

down in a circle and gazing intently at something 

199 



200 ON TAKING THE CALL 

on the floor. "What are you looking at?" he asked. 
"Oh," they chanted in chorus, "we're looking at a spot 
we've never seen before. It's the centre of the stage." 

There are, of course, people who carry the centre 
of the stage with them. It does not matter where 
they go or what they play: they dominate the scene. 
"Where O'Flaherty sits is the head of the table," and 
where Coquelin stood was the centre of the stage. He 
needed no placard to remind you that he was someone 
in particular. You would no more have thought of 
turning the limelight on to him than you would have 
thought of turning it on to the moon at midnight or 
the sun at midday. He just appeared and everyone 
else became accessory to that commanding presence: he 
spoke and all other voices seemed like the chirping of 
sparrows. 

And so in other spheres. Take the case of Mr. 
Asquith, for example, in relation to the House of Com- 
mons. It does not matter where he sits. He may go 
to the darkest corner under the gallery, but the centre 
of the stage will go with him. When he had sat down 
after delivering his first speech in opposition, one of 
the ablest observers in Parliament turned to me and 
said: "The Prime Minister has crossed the floor of 
the House." And that exactly expressed the feeling 
created by that authoritative manner, that masculine 
voice, that air of high detachment from the mere 
squalor and tricks of the Parliamentary game. He 
never seemed greater to the House than in the mo- 
ment when he had fallen — never more its intellectual 



ON TAKING THE CALL 201 

master, its most authentic voice, its wisest and most dis- 
interested counsellor. 

It is not these men, the Coquelins and the Asquiths, 
who come sprinting before the curtain after drench- 
ing themselves in the limelight on the stage. They 
hate the limelight and they are indifferent to the ap- 
plause. The gentry who cultivate the art of "taking 
the call" are quite another breed. You know the type, 
both on the stage and off. Take that eminent actor, 
Bluffington Phelps. He shambles about the stage, his 
words gurgle in his throat, his eyes roll like a bull's 
under torture; if he is not throwing agonised glances 
at the man with the limelight he is straining to catch 
the voice of the prompter at the flies. But when it 
comes to "taking the call" there is not his superior on 
the stage. He monopolises the applause as he monopo- 
lises the limelight, and by these artifices he has per- 
suaded the public that he is an actor. . It is a glorious 
joke — 

Hood an ass in reverend purple, 

So that you hide his too ambitious ears, 

And he shall pass for a cathedral doctor. 

It is true, as Lincoln said, that you can fool some 
of the people all the time. Mr. Bluffington Phelps 
knows that it is true. He knows that there is a large 
part of the public, possibly the majority of the public, 
which is born to be fooled, which will believe any- 
thing because it hasn't the faculty of judging anything 
but the size of the crowd and which will always follow 
the ass with the longest ears and the loudest bray. 



202 ON TAKING THE CALL 

It is the same off the stage. The art of politics is 
the art of "taking the call." Harley knew the trick 
perfectly. Where anything was to be got, it was said 
of him, he always knew how to wriggle himself in; 
when any misfortune threatened he knew how to 
wriggle himself out. He took the cheers and passed 
the kicks on to his colleagues. His chivalrous spirit 
is not dead. It is familiar in every country, but most 
of all in democratic countries. We all know the type 
of politician who has the true genius for the limelight. 
If the newspapers forget him for five minutes he is 
miserable. "What has happened to the publicity de- 
partment? Has the fellow in charge of the limelight 
gone to sleep? Wake him up. Don't let the public 
forget me. If there's nothing else to tell 'em, tell 'em 
that my hat is two sizes larger than it was a year ago. 
Tell 'em about my famous smile. Tell 'em about my 
dear old grandmother to whom I owe my inimitable 
piety. Tell 'em I'm at my desk at seven o'clock every 
morning and never leave it until half-past seven the 
next morning. Tell 'em anything you like — only tell 
em. 

If things go right, and there is applause in the 
house, he skips in front of the curtain to take the call. 
"Thank you, gentlemen — and ladies. Thank you. 
Yes, alone I did it. Nobody else in the company had 
a hand in it — nor a finger. No, not a finger." If 
anything goes wrong and the audience hiss, does he 
shirk the ordeal? Not at all. He comes before the 
curtain with indignant sorrow. "Yes, ladies and gen- 
tlemen, I agree with you. Most scandalous failure. 



ON TAKING THE CALL 203 

It was all Jones's doing, and Smith's, and Robinson's. 
I went down on my bended knees to them, but they 
wouldn't listen to me — wouldn't listen. And now you 
see what's happened. Hear the anguish in my voice. 
Look at the tears in my broken-hearted eyes. Oh, the 
pity of it, ladies and gentlemen — the pity of it. And 
I tried so hard — I really did. But they wouldn't lis- 
ten — they wouldn't 1-1-listen." (Breaks down in sobs.) 
I recall a legend that seems apposite. A certain 
politician of antiquity — let us call him Eurysthenes — 
hit on a happy idea for making himself famous. He 
bought a lot of parrots and taught them to shriek 
"Great is Eurysthenes!" Then he turned them all 
out into the woods, and there they sat and squawked 
"Great is Eurysthenes." And the Athenians, aston- 
ished at such unanimity, took up the refrain and cried, 
"Great is Eurysthenes." And Eurysthenes, who was 
waiting in the flies, so to speak, took the call and was 
famous ever after. 





A DITHYRAMB ON A DOG 



Chum^ roped securely to the cherry tree, is barking 
at the universe in general and at the cows in the 
paddock beyond the orchard in particular. Occa- 
sionally he pauses to snap at passing bees, of which 
the orchard is full on this bright May morning; but 
he soon tires of this diversion and resumes his loud- 
voiced demand to share in the good things that are 
going. For the sun is high, the cuckoo is shouting 
over the valley, and the woods are calling him to 
unknown adventures. They shall not call in vain. 
Work shall be suspended and this morning shall be 
dedicated to his service. For this is the day of 
deliverance. The word is spoken and the shadow of 
the sword is lifted. The battle for his biscuit is 
won. 

He does not know what a narrow shave he has had. 

He does not know that for weeks past he has been 

under sentence of death as an encumbrance, a luxury 

that this savage world of men could no longer afford; 

204 



A DITHYRAMB ON A DOG 205 

that having taken away his bones we were about to 
take away his biscuits and leave his cheerful com- 
panionship a memory of the dream world we lived in 
before the Great Killing began. All this he does not 
know. That is one of the numerous advantages of 
being a dog. He knows nothing of the infamies of 
men or of the incertitudes of life. He does not look 
before and after and pine for what is not. He has 
no yesterday and no to-morrow — only the happy or 
the unhappy present. He does not, as Whitman 
says, "lie awake at night thinking of his soul," or 
lamenting his past or worrying about his future. 
His bereavements do not disturb him and he doesn't 
care twopence about his career. He has no debts 
and hungers for no honours. He would rather have 
a bone than a baronetcy. He does not turn over old 
albums, with their pictured records of forgotten 
holidays and happy scenes, and yearn for the "tender 
grace of a day that is dead," or wonder whether he 
will keep his job and what will become of his "poor 
old family," as Stevenson used to say, if he doesn't, 
or speculate whether the war will end this year, next 
year, some time, or never. He doesn't even know 
there is a war. Think of it! He doesn't know 
there is a war. O happy dog! Give him a bone, a 
biscuit, a good word, and a scamper in the woods, 
and his cup of joy is full. Would that my needs were 
as few and as easily satisfied. 

And now his biscuit is safe and I have the rare 
privilege of rejoicing with Sir Frederick Banbury. 
I do not know that I should go as far as he seems to 



2o6 A DITHYRAMB ON A DOG 

go, for in that touching little speech of his at the 
Cannon Street Hotel he indicated that nothing in 
the heavens above or in the earth beneath should 
stand between him and his dogs. "In August 1914," 
he said, "my son w^ent to France. The night 
before he left he said, 'Father, look after my dogs 
and horses while I am away.' I said, 'Don't you 
worry about them.' He was killed in December, and 
I have got the horses and dogs now. As I said to 
Mr. Bonar Law last year, I should like to see the man 
who would tell me I have not to look after my son's 
dogs and horses." Well, I suppose that if the choice 
were between a German victory and a dog biscuit, 
the dog biscuit would have to go. Sir Frederick. But 
I rejoice with you that we have not to make the 
choice. I rejoice that the sentence of death has 
passed from your dead son's horses and dogs and from 
that noble creature under the cherry tree. 

Look at him, barking now at the cows, now with 
eloquent appeal at me, and then, having caught my 
eye, turning sportively to worry the hated rope. He 
knows that my intentions this morning are honour- 
able. I think he feels that, in spite of appearances, 
I am in that humour in which at any radiant moment 
the magic word "Walk" may leap from my lips. 
What a word that is. No sleep so sound that it will 
not penetrate its depths and bring him, passionately 
awake, to his feet. He would sacrifice the whole 
dictionary for that one electric syllable. That and 
its brother "Bones." Give him these good, sound, 
sensible words, and all the fancies of the poets and 



A DITHYRAMB ON A DOG 207 

all the rhetoric of the statesmen may whistle down 
the winds. He has no use for them. "Walk" and 
"Bones" — that is the speech a fellow can understand. 

Yes, Chum knows very well that I am thinking 
about him and thinking about him in an uncommonly 
friendly way. That is the secret of the strange 
intimacy between us. We may love other animals, 
and other animals may respond to our affection. 
But the dog is the only animal who has a reciprocal 
intelligence. As Coleridge says, he is the only animal 
that looks upward to man, strains to catch his mean- 
ings, hungers for his approval. Stroke a cat or a 
horse, and it will have a physical pleasure ; but pat 
Chum and call him "Good dog!" and he has a 
spiritual pleasure. He feels good. He is pleased 
because you are pleased. His tail, his eyebrows, every 
part of him, proclaim that "God's in his heaven, all's 
right with the world," and that he himself is on the 
side of the angels. 

And just as he has the sense of virtue, so also he 
has the sense of sin. A cat may be taught not to do 
certain things, but if it is caught out and flees, it flees 
not from shame, but from fear. But the shame of a 
dog touches an abyss of misery as bottomless as any 
human emotion. He has fallen out of the state of 
grace, and nothing but the absolution and remission 
of his sin will restore him to happiness. By his 
association with man he seems to have caught some- 
thing of his capacity for spiritual misery. I had an 
Airedale once who had moods of despondency as 
abysmal as my own. He was as sentimental as any 



2o8 A DITHYRAMB ON A DOG 

minor poet, and at the sound of certain tunes on the 
piano he would break into paroxysms of grief, whining 
and moaning as if in one moment of concentrated 
anguish he recalled every bereavement he had en- 
dured, every bone he had lost, every stone heaved at 
him by his hated enemy, the butcher's boy. Indeed, 
there are tirnes when the dog approximates so close to 
our intelligence that he seems to be of us, a sort of 
humble relation of ourselves, with our elementary feel- 
ings but not our gift of expression, our joy but not 
our laughter, our misery but not our tears, our thoughts 
but not our speech. To sentence him to death would 
be almost like homicide, and the day of his reprieve 
should be celebrated as a festival. . . . 

Come, old friend. Let us away to the woods. 
"Walk." 



-^> 




"<^^^^^.-^^ 




ON HAPPY FACES IN THE STRAND 



I WAS walking along the Strand a few afternoons ago 
and had a singuar impression of a cheerful world. 
The Strand is to me always the most attractive street 
I know, especially on bright afternoons when the sun 
is drooping behind the Admiralty Arch and its light 
glints and dances in the eyes of the crowd moving 
westward. Then it is that I seem to see the way- 
farers transfigured into a procession hurrying in pur- 
suit of some sunlit adventure of the soul, and am 
almost persuaded to turn round and catch with them 
the flash of vision that gleams in their eyes. But the 
thing that struck me this afternoon was the unusual 
gaiety of the people. It seemed to me that I had 
209 



2IO ON HAPPY FACES IN THE STRAND 

never seen such a procession of laughing, happy faces. 
Probably it was due to the fact that it was about 
the time when the afternoon theatres were empty- 
ing. Probably also the impression on my mind was 
all the sharper because it was a day of depressing 
tidings — bad news from Russia, from Italy, from 
everywhere. I did not suppose that these merry people 
were ignorant of the news or indifferent to it. They 
were simply obeying the impulse of healthy minds and 
good digestions to be cheerful — quand meme. 

And as I passed along I wondered whether, in 
spite of all the tragedy in which our life is cast, our 
fund of personal happiness is undiminished. Do we 
come into the world with a certain capacity for 
pleasure and pain and realise it no matter what our 
external circumstances may be? Johnson took that 
view and expressed it in the familiar lines incorporated 
in Goldsmith's "Traveller" — the only lines of John- 
son's very pedestrian poetry which have won a sort 
of immortality: 

How small of all that human hearts endure, 
That part which kings or laws can cause or cure. 
Still to ourselves in every place consigned 
Our own felicity we make or find. 

In its political intention I have always disagreed with 
this verse. Johnson was a Tory who loved liberty in 
its social meanings, but distrusted it as a political ideal 
and hated all agitation for reform. And because he 
hated reform he said that our happiness had no re- 
lation to the conditions in which we live. 



ON HAPPY FACES IN THE STRAND 211 

It is an argument which must be a great comfort 
to the slum-owner, the slave-owner, the profiteer, and 
all the odious people who live by exploiting others. 
And like most falsities there is a sense in which it 
is true. The child playing in a sunless court laughs 
as gaily and probably experiences as much animal hap- 
piness — assuming it is sufficiently fed and sufficiently 
warm — as the boy in the Eton playing fields. It is 
a mercy it is so. It is a mercy that we have this 
reservoir of defiant happiness within that answers the 
harsh and bitter blows of outward circumstance. But 
he who advances this fact as a political argument is not 
a wise man. Is the quality of happiness nothing? Is 
it nothing to us whether we find our happiness over a 
pint pot, or in the love of gardens, the beauties of the 
world and the infinite fields of the mind's adventures? 
Is it nothing to society? We have learned that even 
the pig is better for a clean sty. 

But putting aside the quality of happiness and its 
social aspects, there is much truth in Johnson's lines. 
Happiness is an entirely personal affair. We have it 
in large measure or in small, but in so far as we 
have it it is wholly and completely ours and not the 
sport of fortune. I do not say that if you put me in 
a dungeon it will not lessen the sum of my happiness, 
for personal freedom is the soul of happiness. If 
you are a sensitive person the sorrows of the world 
will afflict you, but they will afflict you as a personal 
thing, and it may be doubted whether their magnitude 
will add to the affliction. I hope it is not a shocking 
thing to say, but I sometimes doubt, looking on the 



212 ON HAPPY FACES IN THE STRAND 

world as it appears to me and putting aside the infinity 
of sheer physical suffering, whether the sum of per- 
sonal happiness is less to-day than in normal times. 

I was talking the other day to a well-known author, 
who expressed satisfaction that he had had the good 
fortune to live in the most "interesting" period of 
the world's history. There was an indignant protest 
against the word from another member of the com- 
pany ; but the author insisted. Yes, interesting. Could 
not tragedy be interesting as well as comedy? Could 
not one feel all the horror and misery and insanity 
of this frightful upheaval, shoulder one's tasks, take 
one's part in the battle, and still preserve in the 
quiet chambers of the mind a detached and philosophic 
contemplation of the drama and pronounce it — ^yes, 
interesting? His own record of unselfish service dur- 
ing the war, and his passionate desire for a sane and 
ordered world were too unquestionable for his meaning 
to be misunderstood. 

And the idea he wished to convey was sound enough. 
There has never been an event on the earth which 
has so absorbed the thought, the energies, and the 
faculties of men as the catastrophe through which we 
are living. It overshadows every moment of our lives, 
colours everything that we do, roots up our habits, 
cuts down our food, breaks up our homes, scatters 
the dead like leaves over the plains of Europe, and 
sows the seas with the wreckage of a thousand ships. 
I can fancy that when our great-grandchildren in 
2017 look back upon the days of their forefathers they 
will picture us cowering like sheep before the tempest, 



ON HAPPY FACES IN THE STRAND 213 

with no thought except of the gigantic cataclysm that 
has overtaken us. In a sense they will be right. 
In another sense they will be wrong. We are living 
through a nightmare, but we laugh in our dreams. 
The vastness of the general calamity might be expected 
to plunge us individually in despair. But it doesn't. 
Individually we seem to preserve a defiant cheerful- 
ness, snatch our pleasures with a sharpened appetite, 
can even find a fascination in the wild sky and the 
lightnings that stab the tortured earth. 

As I look up I see the buses passing and read the 
announcements on the knife-boards. You might, read- 
ing them, suppose that we were living in the most 
light-hearted of worlds. There is "A Little Bit of 
Fluff" at one theatre, "High Jinks" at another, 
"Monty's Flapper" here, the "Bing Girls" there, and 
someone called Shirley Kellogg invites me to "Zig- 
Zag." These, my dear child of a.d. 2017, are the 
things with which England amused itself in the time 
of the tempest. And do not forget also that it was 
during the great war that Charlie Chaplin swept the 
two hemispheres with the magic of his incomparable 
idiocy. Perhaps without the great war he could not 
have achieved such unparalleled renown. For this 
levity is largely a counterpoise to our anxieties — a 
violent reaction against events, an attempt to keep 
the balance of things even. The strain on us is so 
heavy that we tend to go a little wildly in extremes, 
as the ship sailing through heavy seas plunges into 
the trough of the waves and then soars skyward but 
preserves its equilibrium throughout. 



214 ON HAPPY FACES IN THE STRAND 

We are seen both at our best and our worst — 
stripped naked as it were to the soul, our disguises 
gone, our real selves revealed to ourselves and to our 
neighbours, and with equal surprise to both. Our 
nerve ends are bare, and our reactions to circumstance 
are violent and irrational. We are at once more 
generous and more bitter. We are the sport even of 
the weather. If we see the silver lining of our spiritual 
cloud more brilliantly when the sun laughs in our 
faces, our depression touches a more abysmal note 
when the east wind blows and we flounder in the slush 
of our winter nights. I could not help associating 
with the procession of happy faces in the Strand 
another widely different incident that I witnessed in 
a bus the other night. It seemed the reverse side 
of the same shield. A respectably dressed, middle- 
aged pair came in out of the darkness and the sleet. 
They were both rather large, and there was not much 
room, but they squeezed themselves into two vacant 
places with an air of silent resolution which indicated 
that they would stand no nonsense, knew how to 
demand their "rights" and had no civility to waste 
on anybody. You know the sort of people. If you 
don't get out of their way in double quick time they 
simply sit down on you. They do not say "Is there 
room?" or "Can you make room?" That would be 
a sign of weakness, an act of politeness, and they 
abominate politeness except in other people. They 
expect it in other people. 

"Where are you going to?" asked the woman when 
they were seated. 



ON HAPPY FACES IN THE STRAND 215 

"Victoria," said the man with a snap. 

"Well you needn't bite my head off," said the 
woman. 

"I've told you six times," snapped the man. 

"What a bully you are," retorted the woman. 
Then they subsided into silence. Husband and wife, 
I thought — bursting with bad temper to such an extent 
that they boil over even in a bus full of people. 
Probably they have been snarling like that ever since 
their honeymoon, and will go on snarling until one 
puts on crape for the other. 

But on second thoughts I concluded that this was 
probably unjust. They had come in out of the slush 
and the blackness, and had got the gloom of the 
London night in their souls. Most of us get it in 
our souls more or less. It makes us ill-humoured and 
depressed. In the early days there was a certain 
novelty in the darkened streets, and some ecstatic 
writers discovered that London had never been so 
beautiful before. They even wrote poems about it. 
When you blundered into a pillar-box and began 
making profuse apologies, or stumbled against the 
kerb-stone, or fell into the arms of some invisible 
but substantial part of the darkness, or scurried fran- 
tically across Trafalgar Square, you felt that it was 
all part of the great adventure of war and was in 
its way rather romantic and exhilarating. But three 
winters of that experience have exhausted our enthusi- 
asm and have made London at night a mere debauch 
of depression except for those who make it a debauch 
of another kind. 



2i6 ON HAPPY FACES IN THE STRAND 

But whatever the explanation of that little scene 
in the bus, there is no doubt that as the long strain 
goes on it plays havoc with our nerves and our 
tempers. We are tired and angry with this mad 
world, and since we cannot visit our anger on the 
enemy we visit it very unreasonably on each other. 
The shattered vase of life lies in ruins at our feet, and 
there is an overmastering temptation to grind the frag- 
ments to dust rather than piece them together for 
the healing future to restore. We have lost faith 
in men, in principles, in ideals, in ourselves, and are 
subdued to the naked barbarism into which civilisa- 
tion has collapsed. Religion was never at so low an 
ebb, so openly repudiated, or, what is worse, so 
travestied by charlatans and blackguards. I heard the 
other day the description of an address at a public 
gathering by a person who mixed up his blasphemies 
about some new god of the creature's imagining with 
obscenities that would be impossible on a music hall 
stage. 

In the Divorce Court last week the counsel for the 
lady in the case gravely advanced the plea that in 
these days, when men are dying by the million in 
mud and filth, the women at home must not be denied 
their excitements, their flirtations and their late sup- 
pers. When Mars is abroad Venus must be abroad 
too. Murder is the sole business of the world and 
lust is its proper pastime. Take a glance at any 
bookstall and note the garbage which lines its shelves. 
Dip into the morass of the popular Sunday news- 
papers with their millions of circulation and see the 



ON HAPPY FACES IN THE STRAND 217 




broth of foulness in which the great public take their 
weekly intellectual bath. The tide has overwhelmed 
the Stage as it has overwhelmed the Church, and a 
wild levity companions our illimitable tragedy. 

It is no new phenomenon. In time of peril humanity 
always reveals these extravagant contrasts, and Boc- 
caccio, with the true instinct of the artist, set his 
tales of merriment and licentiousness against the back- 
ground of a city perishing of plague. We live at 
once more intensely and more frivolously. The pendu- 
lum of our emotions swings violently from extreme 
to extreme and a defiant exhilaration answers the 
mood of depression and anxiety. I can conceive that 
that couple in the bus were quite merry when they 
saw the sun shine in the morning and read that Vimy 
Ridge had been won. There is, in Pepys* Diary, 
a delightful illustration of the swift transitions by 



2i8 ON HAPPY FACES IN THE STRAND 

which the mind in times of stress seeks to keep 
its equipoise. It is the loth Sept. (Lord's Day), 1665: 
The plague is at its worst and the whole city seems 
doomed. The war with the Dutch is going badly. 
Mrs. Pepys' father is dying, and everything looks 
black. But there comes news of a success at sea and 
Pepys goes down the river to meet Lord Brouncker 
and Sir J. Minnes at Greenwich — 

"Where we supped [there was also Sir W. Doyly and Mr. 
Evelyn] ; but the receipt of this news did put us all into 
such an extasy of joy that it inspired into Sir J. Minnes 
and Mr. Evelyn such a spirit of mirth that in all my 
life I never met so merry a two hours as our company 
this night. Among other humours, Mr. Evelyn's repeat- 
ing of some verses made up of nothing but the various 
acceptations of may and can, and doing it so aptly upon 
occasion of something of that nature, and so fast, did make 
us all die almost with laughing, and did so stop the mouth 
of Sir J. Minnes in the middle of all his mirth that I 
never saw any man so out-done in all my life; and Sir 
J. Minnes's mirth to see himself out-done was the crown 
of all our mirth." 

Isn't that a wonderful picture? And think of the 
grave John Evelyn having this gaiety in him! You 
will read the whole of his Diary and not get one 
smile from his severe countenance. I had the curiosity 
to turn to his own record of the same time. He 
has no entry for the loth, but two days before he says: 

"Came home, there perishing neere 10,000 poor creatures 
weekly; however I went all along the City and suburbs 
from Kent Streete to St, James's, a dismal passage, and 



ON HAPPY FACES IN THE STRAND 219 

dangerous to see so many coffins expos'd in the streetes, 
novf thin of people ; the shops shut up and all in mourneful 
silence, as not knowing whose turn might be next." 

And then, at the receipt of a bit of good news 
this austere man is seized with "such an extasy of joy" 
that he gives Pepys the merriest evening of his life. 
And Pepys was a good judge of merry evenings. 

The truth is expressed somewhere in Hardy's works, 
where he says that the soul's specific gravity is always 
less than that of the sea of circumstances into which 
it is cast and rises unfailingly to the surface. There 
comes to my mind as illustrating this truth a passage 
in that great and moving book "Under Fire" — the 
most tremendous picture of the horror and squalor 
of war ever painted by man. One of the squad of 
French soldiers with whom the book deals is in the 
trenches near Souchez and the Vimy Ridge. It is 
before the English had taken over that part of the 
line. There is a quiet time and some of the men 
get on companionable terms with the enemy. This 
man's wife and child are in Lens, just behind the 
German lines. He has not seen them for eighteen 
months, and out of sheer good nature the German 
soldiers lend him a uniform and smuggle him into a 
coal fatigue which is going into Lens. He passes in 
the disguise among his enemy companions by his own 
house and sees through the open door his wife and 
the widow of a comrade sitting at their work. In 
the room with them are two German non-commis- 
sioned officers, and his child is on the knee of one of 
them. 



220 ON HAPPY FACES IN THE STRAND 

But the thing that strikes him to the heart is the 
fact that his wife is smiling as she talks to the non- 
coms. — "Not a forced smile, not a debtor's smile, non, 
a real smile that came from her, that she gave." He 
did not doubt her affection or her loyalty, and when 
the bitterness had passed and he was back in his lines 
and telling his comrade of the adventure, he defended 
her from the criticism of his own mind in words of 
extraordinary beauty: 

"She's quite young, you know; she's twenty-six. She 
can't hold her youth in, it's coming out of her all over, and 
when she's resting in the lamplight and the warmth, she's 
got to smile; and even if she burst out laughing, it would 
just simply be her youth singing in her throat. It isn't 
on account of others, if truth were told ; it's on account of 
herself. It's life. She lives. Ah, yes, she lives and that's 
all. It isn't her fault if she lives. You wouldn't have her 
die? Very well, what do you want her to do? Cry all 
day on account of me and the Boches? Grouse? One 
can't cry all the time, nor grouse for eighteen months. 
Can't be done. It's too long, I tell you. That's all there 
is to it." 

In that poignant story we touch the root of the 
matter. We live. And, living, the light and shadow 
of life play across the surface of ourselves, though 
deep down in our hearts there is the sense of the 
unspeakable tragedy of things. We may wonder that 
we can be happy and may be rather ashamed of it, 
but "we live" and we cannot deny our natures. We 
may, like Miss Havisham, draw down the blinds, shut 
out the world, and dwell in darkness, but then we 
cease to live and become mad. We must laugh if 




"4 real smile. . . ." 



222 ON HAPPY FACES IN THE STRAND 

only to keep our sanity, and nature arranges that we 
shall laugh even in the face of terrible things. There 
was a good deal of truth in the remark of the French 
lady to Boswell that "Our happiness depends on the 
circulation of the blood." The wild current of affairs 
sweeps us on whithersoever it will, but in our separate 
little eddies we whirl around and find relief in private 
distractions and pleasures that seem independent of 
the great march of events. Jane Austen wrote her 
novels in the midst of the Napoleonic wars, yet I 
cannot recall one hint in them of that world-shaking 
event. She mentioned a battle in one of her letters, 
but even then only a little callously. And a friend 
of mine told me the other day that he had had the 
curiosity to turn up the newspaper files of the time 
of Austerlitz and found that the public were ap- 
parently all agog, not about the battle that had changed 
the current of the world, but about the merits of 
the Infant Roscius. It is well that we have this 
faculty of detachment and independent life. If there 
were no private relief for this public tragedy the 
world would have gone mad. But perhaps you will 
say it has gone mad. . . . 

Let me recall by way of envoi that fine story in 
Montaigne. When the town of Nola was destroyed 
by the barbarians Paulinus, the bishop, was stripped 
of all he possessed and taken prisoner. And as he 
was led away he prayed, "O Lord, make me to bear 
this loss, for Thou knowest that they have taken 
nothing that is mine: the riches that made me rich 
and the treasures that made me worthy are still mine 
in their fullness." 




ON WORD-MAGIC 

I SEE that a discussion has arisen in the Spectator 
on the "Canadian Boat Song." It appeared in 
Blackwood's nearly a century ago, and ever since its 
authorship has been the subject of recurrent contro- 
versy. The author may have been "Christopher North," 
or his brother, Tom Wilson, or Gait, or the Ettrick 
Shepherd, or the Earl of Eglinton, or none of these. 
We shall never know. It is one of those pleasant 
mysteries of the past, like the authorship of the Junius 
Letters (if, indeed, that can be called a mystery), 
which can never be exhausted because they can never 
be solved. I am not going to offer an opinion; for I 
have none, and I refer to the subject only to illustrate 
the magic of a word. The poem lives by virtue of the 
famous stanza: — 



From the lone shieling of the misty island 

Mountains divide us, and the waste of seas — 

Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland, 
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides. 
223 



224 ON WORD-MAGIC 

It would be an insensible heart that did not feel 
the surge of this strong music. The yearning of the 
exile for the motherland has never been uttered with 
more poignant beauty, though Stevenson came near the 
same note of tender anguish in the lines written in far 
Samoa and ending: — 

Be it granted me to behold you again, in dying, 
Hills of home, and to hear again the call. 

Hear about the graves of the martyrs the peewees crying — 
And hear no more at all. 

But for energy and masculine emotion the unknown 
author takes the palm. The verse is like a great 
wave of the sea, rolling in to the mother shore, 
gathering impetus and grandeur as it goes, culminating 
in the note of vision and scattering itself triumphantly 
in the splendour of that word "Hebrides." 

It is a beautiful illustration of the magic of a word 
used in its perfect setting. It gathers up the emotion 
of the theme into one chord of fulfilment and flings 
open the casement of the mind to far horizons. It 
is not the only instance in which the name has been 
used with extraordinary effect. Wordsworth's "Soli- 
tary Reaper" has many beautiful lines, but the peculiar 
glory of the poem dwells in the couplet in which, 
searching for parallels for the song of the Highland 
girl that fills "the vale profound," he hears in imagina- 
tion the cuckoo's call 

Breaking the silence of the seas 
Among the farthest Hebrides. 



ON WORD-MAGIC 225 

Wordsworth, like Homer and Milton, and all who 
touch the sublime in poetry, had the power of trans- 
muting a proper name to a strange and significant 
beauty. The most memorable example, perhaps, is 
in the closing lines of the poem to Dorothy 
Wordsworth : — 

But an old age serene and bright, 
And lovely as a Lapland night. 
Shall lead thee to thy grave. 

"Lapland" is an intrinsically beautiful word, but 
it is its setting in this case that makes it shine, pure 
and austere, like a star in the heavens of poetry. 
And the miraculous word need not be intrinsically 
beautiful. Darien is not, yet it is that word in which 
perhaps the greatest of all sonnets finds its breathless, 
astonished close: — 

Silent — upon a peak — in Dar — ien. 

And the truth is that the magic of words is not in 
the words themselves, but in the distinction, delicacy, 
surprise of their use. Take the great line which 
Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Antony — 

I am dying, Egypt, dying. 

It is the only occasion in the play which he makes 
Antony speak of Cleopatra by her territorial name 
and there is no warrant for the usage of Plutarch. 
It is a stroke of sheer word magic. It summons up 
with a sudden magnificence all the mystery and 



226 ON WORD-MAGIC 

splendour incarnated in the woman for whom he 
has gambled away the world and all the earthly 
glories that are fading into the darkness of death. 
The whole tragedy seems to flame to its culmination 
in this word that suddenly lifts the action from the 
human plane to the scale of cosmic drama. 

Words of course have an individuality, a perfume 
of their own, but just as the flame in the heart of the 
diamond has to be revealed by the craftsman, so 
the true magic of a beautiful word only discloses itself 
at the touch of the master. "Quiet" is an ordinary 
enough word, and few are more frequently on our 
lips. Yet what wonderful effects Wordsworth, Cole- 
ridge and Keats extract from it: — 

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free; 
The holy time is quiet as a nun, 
Breathless with adoration. 

The whole passage is a symphony of the sunset, but 
it is that ordinary word "quiet" which breathes like 
a benediction through the cadence, filling the mind 
with the sense of an illimitable peace. And so with 
Coleridge's "singeth a quiet tune," or Keats' : — 

Full of sweet dreams and health and quiet breathing. 
Or when, "half in love with easeful Death," he 

Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme 
To take into the air my quiet breath. 

And again : — 



ON WORD-MAGIC 227 

Far from the fiery noon and eve's one star 
Sat grey-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone. 

There have been greater poets than Keats, but 
none who has had so sure an instinct for the precious 
word as he had. Byron had none of this magician 
touch, Shelley got his effects by the glow and fervour 
of his spirit; Swinburne by the sheer torrent of his 
song, and Browning by the energy of his thought. 
Tennyson was much more of the artificer in words 
than these, but he had not the secret of the 
word-magic of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, or Keats. 
Compare the use of adjectives in two things like 
Shelley's "Ode to the Skylark" and Keats' "Ode to the 
Nightingale," and the difference is startling. Both 
are incomparable, but in the one case it is the hurry 
of the song, the flood of rapture that delights us: in 
the other each separate line holds us with its jewelled 
word. "Embalmed darkness." "Verdurous glooms." 
"Now more than ever seems it rich to die." "Cooled 
a long age in the deep-delved earth." "Darkling I 
listen." "She stood in tears amid the alien corn." 
"Oh, for a beaker full of the warm south." "With 
beaded bubbles winking at the brim." "No hungry 
generations tread thee down." And so on. Such a 
casket of jewels can be found in no other poet that has 
used our tongue. If Keats' vocabulary had a defect it 
was a certain over-ripeness, a languorous beauty that, 
like the touch of his hand, spoke of death. It lacked 
the fresh, happy, sunlit spirit of Shakespeare's sovran 
word. 



228 



ON WORD-MAGIC 



Word-magic belongs to poetry. In prose It is 
an intrusion. That was the view of Coleridge. It 
was because, among its other qualities, Southey's 
writing was so free from the shock of the dazzling 
word that Coleridge held it to be the perfect example 
of pure prose. The modulations are so just, the note 
so unaffected, the current so clear and untroubled 
that you read on without pausing once to think "What 
a brilliant writer this fellow is." And that is the 
true triumph of the art. It is an art which addresses 
itself to the mind, and not the emotions, and word- 
magic does not belong to its true armoury. 





ODIN GROWN OLD 



I HAD a strange dream last night. Like most dreams, 
it was a sort of wild comment on the thought that 
had possessed me in my waking hours. We had been 
talking of the darkness of these times, how we walked 
from day to day into a future that stalked before us 
like a wall of impenetrable night that we could almost 
touch and yet never could overtake, how all the 
prophets (including ourselves) had been found out, and 
how all the prophecies of the wise proved to be as 
worthless as the guesses of the foolish. Ah, if we 
could only get behind this grim mask of the present 
and see the future stretching before us ten years, twenty 
years, fifty years hence, what would we give? What 
a strange, ironic light would be shed upon this writh- 
ing, surging, blood-stained Europe. With what a 
shock we should discover the meaning of the terror. 
229 



230 ODIN GROWN OLD 

But the Moving Finger writes on with inscrutable se- 
crecy. We cannot wipe out a syllable that it has writ- 
ten ; we cannot tell a syllable that it will write. . . . 

You deserved bad dreams, you will say, if you talked 
like this. . . . 

When I awoke (in my sleep) I seemed like some 
strange reminiscence of myself, like an echo that had 
gone on reverberating down countless centuries. It 
was as if I had lived from the beginning of Time, 
and now stood far beyond the confines of Time. I 
was alone in the world. I forded rivers and climbed 
mountains and traversed endless plains; I came upon 
the ruins of vast cities, great embankments that seemed 
once to have been railways, fragments of arches that had 
once sustained great bridges, dockyards where the skele- 
tons of mighty ships lay rotting in garments of seaweed 
and slime. I seemed, with the magic of dreams, to 
see the whole earth stretched out before me like a map. 
I traced the course of the coast lines, saw how strangely 
altered they were, and with invisible power passed 
breathlessly from continent to continent, from desola- 
tion to desolation. Again and again I cried out in the 
agony of an unspeakable loneliness, but my cry only 
startled a solitude that was infinite. Time seemed to 
have no meaning in this appalling vacancy. I did not 
live hours or days, but centuries, aeons, eternities. Only 
on the mountains and in the deserts did I see anything 
that recalled the world I had known in the immeasur- 
able backward of time. Standing on the snowy ridge 
of the Finsteraarjoch I saw the pink of the dawn still 
flushing the summits of the Southern Alps, and in 



ODIN GROWN OLD 231 

the desert I came upon the Pyramids and the Sphinx. 

And it was by the Sphinx that I saw The Man. 
He seemed stricken with unthinkable years. His gums 
were toothless, his eyes bleared, his figure shrunken 
to a pitiful tenuity. He sat at the foot of the Sphinx, 
fondling a sword, and as he fondled it he mumbled 
to himself in an infantile treble. As I approached he 
peered at me through his dim eyes, and to my ques- 
tion as to who he was he replied in thin, queasy voice : 

"I am Odin — hee! hee! I possess the earth, the 
whole earth ... I and my sword ... we own it 
all . . . we and the Sphinx . . . we own it all. 
. . . All . . . hee! hee! . . ." And he turned and 
began to fondle his sword again. 

"But where are the others? What happened to 
them?" 

"Gone . . . hee! hee! . . . All gone. ... It took 
thousands of years to do it, but they've all gone. It 
never would have been done if man hadn't become civ- 
ilised. For centuries and centuries men tried to kill 
themselves off with bows and arrows, and spears and 
catapults, but they couldn't do it. Then they invented 
gunpowder, but that was no better. The victory really 
began when man became civilised and discovered mod- 
ern science. He learned to fly in the air and sail under 
water, and move mountains and make lightnings, and 
turn the iron of the hills into great ships and the coal 
beneath the earth into incredible forms of heat and 
power. And all the time he went on saying what a 
good world he was making . . . hee! hee! Such a 
wonderful Machine. . . . Such a peaceful Machine 



232 ODIN GROWN OLD 

. . . hee ! hee ! . . . Age of Reason, he said. . . , Age 
of universal peace and brotherhood setting in, he said. 
. . . Hee! hee! . . . We have been seeking God for 
thousands of years, he said, and novi^ we have found 
Him. We have made Him ourselves — out of our own 
heads. We got tired of looking for Him in the soul. 
Now we have found Him in the laboratory. We have 
made Him out of all the energies of the earth. Great 
is our God of the Machine. Honour, blessing, glory, 
power — power over things. Power! Power! Power!" 

His voice rose to a senile shriek. 

"And all the time . . . hee, hee! ... all the time 
he was making the Machine for me — me, Odin, me 
and my servants, the despots, the kings, the tyrants, 
the dictators, the enemies of men. I laughed . . . hee, 
hee! ... I laughed as I saw his Machine growing 
vaster and vaster for the day of his doom, growing 
beyond his own comprehension, making him more and 
more the slave of itself, the fly on its gigantic wheel. 
What a willing servant is this Power we have made, 
he said. What a friend of Man. How wonderful we 
are to have created this Machine of Benevolence. . . . 

"And it was mine . . . hee, hee! . . . Mine. And 
when it was complete I handed it over to my servants. 
And the Machine of Benevolence became the Monster 
of Destruction. First one tyrant seized it and fell; 
then another and he fell. This white race got the 
Machine for a season, then another white race got it; 
then the yellow race. And they all perished . . . hee, 
hee! . . . They all perished. . . . And with every 



ODIN GROWN OLD 233 

victory the Machine grew more deadly. All the gifts 
of the earth and all the labour of men went to feed its 
mighty hunger. It devoured its creators by thousands, 
by millions, by nations. It slew, it poisoned, it burned, 
it starved. The whole earth became a desolation. . . . 

"And now I own it all . . . hee, hee! ... I and 
my sword. We own it all. . . . We and the Sphinx." 
His voice, which had grown strong with excitement, 
sank back to its infantile treble. 

"And what was the meaning of it all?" I asked. 
"And what will you do with your victory?" 

"The meaning . . . the meaning ... I don't 
know. . . . I've come to ask the Sphinx. I've sat here 
waiting for years, centuries . . . oh, so long. But she 
says nothing — only looks out over the desert with that 
terrible calm, as though she knew the riddle but would 
never tell it. . . . Sometimes I think she is going to 
speak. . . . Look . . . look now. . . . Aren't her 
lips . . ." 

His thin voice rose to a tremulous cry. The 
sword shook in his palsied hands. His rheumy eyes 
looked up at the image with a senile frenzy. 

I looked up, too. . . . Yes, surely the lips were 
moving. They were about to open. I should hear at 
last the reading of the enigma of the strange beings 
who made a God that slew them. . . . The lips were 
open now . . . there was a rattling in the throat. . . . 

But as I waited for the words that were struggling 
into utterance there came a sudden wind, hot and blind- 
ing and thick with the dust of the desert. It blotted 



234 



ODIN GROWN OLD 



out the sun and darkened the vision of things. The 
Sphinx vanished in the swirling folds of the storm, 
the figure of the man faded into the general gloom, 
and I was left alone in the midst of nothingness. . . . 





ON A SMILE IN A SHAVING GLASS 



As I looked into the shaving glass in the privacy of 
the bathroom this morning, I noticed that there vt^as 
a very pronounced smile on my face. I w^as surprised. 
Not that I am a smileless person in ordinary: on the 
contrary, I fancy I have an average measure of mirth- 
fulness — a little patchy perhaps, but enough in quan- 
tity if unequal in distribution. But I have not been 
hilarious for a week past. There is not much to be 
hilarious about in these anxious days when the tide 
of war is sweeping back over the hills and valleys 
of the Somme and every hour comes burdened with 
dark tidings. I find the light-hearted person a trial, 
and gaiety an offence, like a foolish snigger breaking 
in on the mad agony of Lear. 

Why, then, this smiling face in the glass? Only 
last night, coming up on the top of the late bus, I 
was irritated by the good humour of a fat man who 
came and sat in front of me. He looked up at the 
brilliant moonlit sky and round at the passengers, and 
then began humming to himself as though he was full 
of good news and cheerfulness. When he was tired 
of humming he began whistling, and his whistling was 
235 



236 ON A SMILE IN A SHAVING GLASS 

more intolerable than his humming, for it was noisier. 
Hang the fellow, thought I, what is he humming and 
whistling about? This moon that is touching the 
London streets with beauty — what scenes of horror 
and carnage it looks down on only a few score smiles 
away! What nameless heroisms are being done for us 
as we sit under the quiet stars in security and ease! 
What mighty issues are in the balance. . . , And this 
fellow hums and whistles as though he had had no end 
of a good day. Perhaps he is a profiteer. Anyhow, 
I was relieved when he went down the stairs, and his 
vacuous whistling died on the air. . . . Yet this face 
in the glass looked as though it could hum or whistle 
quite as readily as that fat man whom I judged so 
harshly last night. 

It was certainly not the sunny morning that was 
responsible. The beauty of these wonderful days 
would, in ordinary circumstances, charge my spirits to 
the brim, but now I wake to them with a feeling of 
resentment. They are like a satire on our tragedy — 
like marriage garments robing the skeleton of death. 
Moreover, they are a practical as well as a spiritual 
grievance. They are the ally of the enemy. They 
have come when he needed them, just as they deserted 
us last autumn when we needed them, and when day 
after day our gallant men floundered to the attack 
in Flanders through seas of mud. No, most Imperial 
Sun, I cannot welcome you. I would you would hide 
your face from the tortured earth, and leave the rough 
elements to deal out even justice between the disput- 
ants in this great argument. . . . No, this smile can- 



ON A SMILE IN A SHAVING GLASS 237 

not be for you. And it is not wholly a tribute to the 
letter that has just come from that stalwart boy of 
nineteen, boy of the honest, open face and the frequent, 
hearty laugh, stopped on the eve of his first leave and 
plunged into this hell of death. Dated Saturday. All 
well up to Saturday. The first two terrible days sur- 
vived. Those who love him can breathe more freely. 
But though that was perhaps the foundation, it 
did not explain the smile. Ah, I had got it. It was 
that paragraph I had read in the newspaper record- 
ing the Kaiser's message to his wife on the victory 
of his armies, and concluding its flamboyant braying 
with the familiar blasphemy, "God is with us." I 
find that when I am cheerless a message from the 
Kaiser always provides a tonic, and that his patronage 
of the Almighty gives me confidence. This crude, 
humourless vanity cannot be destined to win the world. 
It cannot be that humanity is to suffer so gro- 
tesque a jest as to fall under the heel of this inflated 
buffoon and of the system of which he is the symbol, 
I know that other warriors have claimed the Almighty 
and have justified the claim — have won even in virtue 
of the claim, Mohammedanism swept the Christian 
world before it to the cry of "Allah-il-Allah," and to 
Cromwell the presence of the Lord of Hosts at his 
side was as real as the presence of Jehovah was to the 
warriors of Israel. Stonewall Jackson was all the 
more terrible for the grim, fanatical faith that burned 
in him from the days of his conversion in Mexico, and, 
though Lincoln had no orthodox creed, the sense of 
divine purpose was always present to him, and no one 



238 ON A SMILE IN A SHAVING GLASS 

used the name of the Almighty in great moments with 
more sincere and impressive beauty. 

You have only to turn to Lincoln or Cromwell 
to feel the vast gulf between their piety and this 
vulgar impiety. And the reason is simple. They be- 
lieved in the spiritual governance of human life. Crom- 
well may have been mistaken in his conception of God, 
but it was a God of the spirit whom he served and 
whose unworthy instrument he was in achieving the 
spiritual redemption of men. The material victory 
was nothing to him except as a means of accomplish- 
ing the emancipation of the soul of man, of which 
political liberty was only the elementary expression. 
But the Kaiser's conception of God is a denial of every- 
thing that is spiritual and humane. He talks of his 
God as if. he were a brigand chief, or an image of blood 
and iron wrought in his own likeness, a family deity, a 
sort of sleeping partner of the firm of Hohenzollern, 
to be left snoring when villainy is afoot and nudged 
into wakefulness to adorn a triumph. It is the nega- 
tion of the God of the spirit. It is the God of brute 
force, of violence and terror, tramping on the garden 
of the soul in man. It is the God of materialism at 
war with all that is spiritual. In a word, this thing 
that the Kaiser calls God is not God at all. It is the 
Devil. 

On this question of the partisanship of the Almighty 
in regard to our human quarrels, the best attitude is 
silence. Lincoln, with his unfailing wisdom, set the 
subject in its right relationship when a lady asked 
him for the assurance that God was on their side. 



ON A SMILE IN A SHAVING GLASS 239 

"The important thing," he said, "is not whether God 
is on our side, but whether we are on the side of 
God." This attitude will save us from blasphemous 
arrogance and from a good deal of perplexity. For 
when we claim that God is our champion and is 
fighting exclusively for us we get into difficulties. 
We have only finite tests to apply to an infinite pur- 
pose and by those tests neither the loyalty nor the 
omnipotence of the Almighty will be sustained. And 
what will you do then? Will you, when things go 
wrong, ask with the poet, 

"Is he deaf and blind, our God.' ... Is he indeed at all?" 

The Greeks got out of the dilemma by having many 
deities who took the most intimate share in human 
quarrels, but adopted opposite sides. They could do 
much for their earthly clients, but their efforts were 
neutralised by the power of the gods briefed on the 
other side. Vulcan could forge an impenetrable shield 
for Achilles, and Juno could warn him, through the 
mouth of his horse Xanthus, of his approaching doom, 
but neither could save him. This guess at the spiritual 
world supplied a crude working explanation of the 
queer contrariness of things on the human plane, but 
it left the gods pale and ineffectual shadows of the 
mind. 

We have lost this ingenuous explanation of the 
strange drama of our life. We do not know what 
powers encompass us about, or in what vast rhythm 
the tumultuous surges and wild discords of our being 



240 ON A SMILE IN A SHAVING GLASS 

are engulfed. No voice comes from the void and no 
portents are in the sky. The stars are infinitely aloof 
and the face of nature offers us neither comfort nor 
revelation. But vi^ithin us vi^e feel the impulse of the 
human spirit, seeking the free air, turning to the light 
of beautiful and reasonable things as the flower turns 
to the face of the sun. And in that impulse we find 
the echo to whatever far-off, divine strain we move. 
We cannot doubt its validity. It is the authentic, in- 
destructible note of humanity. We may falter in the 
measure, stumble in our steps, get bewildered admidst 
the complexity of intractible and unintelligible things. 
But the spiritual movement goes on, like the Pilgrim's 
Chorus fighting its way through the torrent of the 
world. It may be submerged to-day, to-morrow, for 
generations; but in the end it wins — in the end the 
moral law prevails over the law of the jungle. The 
stream of tendency has many turnings, but it makes 
for righteousness and saps ceaselessly the foundations 
of the god of violence. It is to that god of harsh, 
material things that the Kaiser appeals against the 
eternal strivings of man towards the divine preroga- 
tive of freedom. Like the false prophets of old he 
leaps on his altar, gashes himself with knives till the 
blood pours out and cries, "Oh, Baal, hear us." And 
it is because Baal is an idol of wood and stone in a 
world subject to the governance of the spirit that, even 
in the darkest hour of the war, we need not lose faith. 
That, I think, is the meaning of the smile I caught 
in the shaving glass this morning. 




ON THE RULE OF THE ROAD 



That was a jolly story which Mr. Arthur Ransome 
told the other day in one of his messages from Petro- 
grad. A stout old lady was walking with her basket 
down the middle of a street in Petrograd to the great 
confusion of the traffic and with no small peril to 
herself. It was pointed out to her that the pavement 
was the place for foot-passengers, but she replied: 
"I'm going to walk where I like. We've got liberty 
now." It did not occur to the dear old lady that if 
liberty entitled the foot-passenger to walk down the 
middle of the road it also entitled the cab-driver to 
drive on the pavement, and that the end of such liberty 
would be universal chaos. Everybody would be getting 
in everybody else's way and nobody would get any- 
where. Individual liberty would have become social 
anarchy. 

241 



242 ON THE RULE OF THE ROAD 

There is a danger of the world getting liberty-drunk 
in these days like the old lady with the basket, and 
it is just as well to remind ourselves of what the rule 
of the road means. It means that in order that the 
liberties of all may be preserved the liberties of 
everybody must be curtailed. When the policeman, 
say, at Piccadilly Circus steps into the middle of the 
road and puts out his hand, he is the symbol not 
of tyranny, but of liberty. You may not think so. 
You may, being in a hurry and seeing your motor- 
car pulled up by this insolence of office, feel that 
your liberty has been outraged. How dare this fellow 
interfere with your free use of the public highway? 
Then, if you are a reasonable person, you will reflect 
that if he did not, incidentally, interfere with you he 
would interfere with no one, and the result would 
be that Piccadilly Circus would be a maelstrom that 
you would never cross at all. You have submitted to 
a curtailment of private liberty in order that you may 
enjoy a social order which makes your liberty a reality. 

Liberty is not a personal affair only, but a social 
contract. It is an accommodation of interests. In 
matters which do not touch anybody else's liberty, 
of course, I may be as free as I like. If I choose to 
go down the Strand in a dressing-gown, with long 
hair and bare feet, who shall say me nay? You 
have liberty to laugh at me, but I have liberty to 
be indifferent to you. And if I have a fancy for dyeing 
my hair, or waxing my moustache (which heaven 
forbid ) , or wearing a tall hat, a frock-coat and sandals, 
or going to bed late or getting up early, I shall follow 



ON THE RULE OF THE ROAD 243 

my fancy and ask no man's permission. I shall not 
inquire of you whether I may eat mustard with my 
mutton. I may like mustard with my mutton. And 
you will not ask me whether you may be a Protestant 
or a Catholic, whether you may marry the dark 
lady or the fair lady, whether you may prefer Ella 
Wheeler Wilcox to Wordsworth, or champagne to 
shandygaff. 

In all these and a thousand other details you and 
I please ourselves and ask no one's leave. We have 
a whole kingdom in which we rule alone, can do what 
we choose, be wise or ridiculous, harsh or easy, con- 
ventional or odd. But directly we step out of that 
kingdom our personal liberty of action becomes 
qualified by other people's liberty. I might like to 
practise on the trombone from midnight till three 
in the morning. If I went on to the top of Helvellyn 
to do it I could please myself, but if I do it in my 
bedroom my family will object and if I do it out in the 
streets the neighbours will remind me that my liberty 
to blow the trombone must not interfere with their 
liberty to sleep in quiet. There are a lot of people 
in the world, and I have to accommodate my liberty 
to their liberties. 

We are all liable to forget this, and unfortunately 
we are much more conscious of the imperfections of 
others in this respect than of our own. 

I got into a railway carriage at a country station 
the other morning and settled down for what the 
schoolboys would call an hour's "swot" at a Blue- 
book. I was not reading it for pleasure. The truth 



244 ON THE RULE OF THE ROAD 

is that I never do read Blue-books for pleasure. I 
read them as a barrister reads a brief, for the very 
humble purpose of turning an honest penny out of 
them. Now, if you are reading a book for pleasure 
it doesn't matter what is going on around you. I 
think I could enjoy "Tristram Shandy" or "Treasure 
Island" in the midst of an earthquake. 

But when you are reading a thing as a task you 
need reasonable quiet, and that is what I didn't 
get, for at the next station in came a couple of men, 
one of whom talked to his friend for the rest of the 
journey in a loud and pompous voice. He was one 
of those people who remind one of that story of Home 
Tooke who, meeting a person of immense swagger 
in the street, stopped him and said, "Excuse me, sir, 
but are you someone in particular?" This gentle- 
man was someone in particular. As I wrestled with 
clauses and sections, his voice rose like a gale, and 
his family history, the deeds of his sons in the war, 
and his criticisms of the generals and the politicians 
submerged my poor attempts to hang on to my job. 
I shut up the Blue-book, looked out of the window, 
and listened wearily while the voice thundered on 
with themes like these: "Now what French ought 
to have done . . ." "The mistake the Germans 
made . . ." "If only Asquith had . . ." You 
know the sort of stuff. I had heard it all before, oh, 
so often. It was like a barrel-organ groaning out 
some banal song of long ago. 

If I had asked him to be good enough to talk in 
a lower tone I daresay he would have thought I was 



ON THE RULE OF THE ROAD 245 

a very rude fellow. It did not occur to him that 
anybody could have anything better to do than to 
listen to him, and I have no doubt he left the carriage 
convinced that everybody in it had, thanks to him, 
had a very illuminating journey, and would carry 
away a pleasing impression of his encyclopaedic range. 
He was obviously a well-intentioned person. The 
thing that was wrong with him was that he had not 
the social sense. He was not "a clubbable man." 

A reasonable consideration for the rights or feelings 
of others is the foundation of social conduct. It is 
commonly alleged against women that in this repect 
they are less civilised than men, and I am bound 
to confess that in my experience it is the woman — 
the well-dressed woman — who thrusts herself in front 
of you at the ticket office. The man would not attempt 
it, partly because he knows the thing would not be 
tolerated from him, but also because he has been better 
drilled in the small give-and-take of social relation- 
ships. He has lived more in the broad current of the 
world, where you have to learn to accommodate your- 
self to the general standard of conduct, and his school 
life, his club life, and his games have in this respect 
given him a training that women are only now begin- 
ning to enjoy. 

I believe that the rights of small people and quiet 
people are as important to preserve as the rights of 
small nationalities. When I hear the aggressive, 
bullying horn which some motorists deliberately use, 
I confess that I feel something boiling up in me which 
is very like what I felt when Germany came trampling 



246 ON THE RULE OF THE ROAD 

like a bully over Belgium, By what right, my dear 
sir, do you go along our highways uttering that 
hideous curse on all who impede your path? Cannot 
you announce your coming like a gentleman? Cannot 
you take your turn? Are you someone in particular 
or are you simply a hot gospeller of the prophet 
Nietzsche ? I find myself wondering what sort of per- 
son it is who can sit behind that hog-like outrage with- 
out realising that he is the spirit of Prussia incarnate, 
and a very ugly spectacle in a civilised world. 

And there is the more harmless person who has 
bought a very blatant gramophone, and on Sunday 
afternoon sets the thing going, opens the windows 
and fills the street with "Keep the Home Fires 
Burning" or some similar banality. What are the 
right limits of social behaviour in a matter of this 
sort? Let us take the trombone as an illustration 
again. Hazlitt said that a man who wanted to learn 
that fearsome instrument was entitled to learn it in 
his own house, even though he was a nuisance to 
his neighbours, but it was his business to make the 
nuisance as slight as possible. He must practise 
in the attic, and shut the window. He had no right 
to sit in his front room, open the window, and blow 
his noise into his neighbours' ears with the maximum 
of violence. And so with the gramophone. If you 
like the gramophone you are entitled to have it, but 
you are interfering with the liberties of your neigh- 
bours if you don't do what you can to limit the noise 
to your own household. Your neighbours may 
not like "Keep the Home Fires Burning." They 




*'No right to sit in his front room, open the window and blow 
his noise into his neighbours' ears." 



248 ON THE RULE OF THE ROAD 

may prefer to have their Sunday afternoon undis- 
turbed, and it is as great an impertinence for you to 
wilfully trespass on their peace as it would be to go, 
unasked, into their gardens and trample on their flower 
beds. 

There are cases, of course, where the clash of 
liberties seems to defy compromise. My dear old 
friend X., who lives in a West End square and who 
is an amazing mixture of good nature and irascibility, 
flies into a passion when he hears a street piano, and 
rushes out to order it away. But near by lives a 
distinguished lady of romantic picaresque tastes, who 
dotes on street pianos, and attracts them as wasps are 
attracted to a jar of jam. Whose liberty in this case 
should surrender to the other? For the life of me I 
cannot say. It is as reasonable to like street pianos 
as to dislike them — and vice versa. I would give much 
to hear Sancho Panza's solution of such a nice riddle. 

I suppose the fact is that we can be neither com- 
plete anarchists nor complete Socialists in this 
complex world — or rather we must be a judicious 
mixture of both. We have both liberties to preserve 
— our individual liberty and our social liberty. We 
must watch the bureaucrat on the one side and warn 
off the anarchist on the other. I am neither a 
Marxist, nor a Tolstoyan, but a compromise. I shall 
not permit any authority to say that my child must 
go to this school or that, shall specialise in science or 
arts, shall play rugger or soccer. These things are 
personal. But if I proceed to say that my child 
shall have no education at all, that he shall be brought 



ON THE RULE OF THE ROAD 249 

up as a primeval savage, or at Mr. Fagin's academy 
for pickpockets, then Society will politely but firmly 
tell me that it has no use for primeval savages and 
a very stern objection to pickpockets, and that my 
child must have a certain minimum of education 
whether I like it or not. I cannot have the liberty 
to be a nuisance to my neighbours or make my child 
a burden and a danger to the commonwealth. 

It is in the small matters of conduct, in the observ- 
ance of the rule of the road, that we pass judgment 
upon ourselves, and declare that we are civilised or 
uncivilised. The great moments of heroism and 
sacrifice are rare. It is the little habits of common- 
place intercourse that make up the great sum of 
life and sweeten or make bitter the journey. I hope 
my friend in the railway carriage will reflect on this. 
Then he will not cease, I am sure, to explain to his 
neighbour where French went wrong and where the 
Germans went ditto; but he will do it in a way that 
will permit me to read my Blue-book undisturbed. 



?^^z^. 





ON THE INDIFFERENCE OF NATURE 

There has never, I suppose, been a time when the 
moon had such a vogue as during the past ten days. 
For centuries, for thousands of years, for I know not 
what uncounted ages, she has been sailing the sky, 
"clustered around with all her starry fays." She has 
seen this tragi-comedy of man since the beginning, and 
I daresay will outlive its end. What she thinks of 
it all we shall never know. Perhaps she laughs at it, 
perhaps she weeps over it, perhaps she does both in 
turns, as you and I do. Perhaps she is only indifferent. 
Yes, I suppose she is indifferent, for she holds up her 
lamp for the just and the unjust, and lights the as- 
sassin's way as readily as the lover's and the shepherd's. 
But in all her timeless journeyings around this flying 
ball to which we cling with our feet she has never 
been a subject of such painful concern as now. Love- 
sick poets have sung of her, and learned men have 
250 



ON INDIFFERENCE OF NATURE 251 

studied her countenance and made maps of her hills 
and her valleys, and children have been lulled to 
sleep with legends of the old man in the moon and 
the old woman eternally gathering her eternal sticks. 
But for most of us she had no more serious import 
than a Chinese lantern hung on a Christmas tree to 
please the children. 

And suddenly she has become the most sensational 
fact of our lives. From the King in his palace to 
the pauper in his workhouse we have all been talking 
of the moon, and watching the moon and studying 
the phases of the moon. There are seven millions 
of Londoners who know more about the moon 
to-day than they ever dreamed there was to be known, 
or than they ever dreamed that they would want to 
know. John Bright once said that the only virtue of 
war was that it taught people geography, but even 
he did not think of the geography of the moon and 
of the firmament. But in the intense school of these 
days we are learning about everything in heaven above 
and in the earth beneath and in the waters under the 
earth. Count Zeppelin taught us about the stars, and 
now Herr von Gotha is giving us a lesson on the moon. 
We are not so grateful as we might be. 

But the main lesson we are all learning, I think, 
is that Nature does not take sides in our affairs. We 
all like to think that she does take sides — that is, our 
side — that a special providence watches over us, and 
that invisible powers will see us through. It is a 
common weakness. The preposterous Kaiser exhibits it 
in its most grotesque assumption. He does really be- 



252 ON INDIFFERENCE OF NATURE 

lieve — or did, for dreadful doubts must be invading 
the armour-plated vanity of this jerry-built Caesar — 
that God and Nature are his Imperial agents. 

And in a less degree most of us, in times of stress, 
pin our faith to some special providence. We are 
so important to ourselves that we cannot conceive that 
we are unimportant to whatever powers there be. 
Others may fall, but we have charmed lives. Our 
cause must prevail because, being ours, it is beyond 
mortal challenge. A distinguished General was tell- 
ing me not long ago of an incident in the second battle 
of Ypres. He stood with another General, since killed, 
watching the battle at its most critical phase. They 
saw the British line yield, and the Germans advance, 
and all seemed over. My friend put up his glasses 
with the gesture of one who knew the worst had come. 
His companion turned to him and said, "God will 
never allow those to win." It was an odd ex- 
pression of faith, but it represents the conviction latent 
in most of us that we can count on invisible allies who, 
like the goddess in Homer, will intervene if we are in 
straits, and fling a cloud between us and the foe. 

This reliance on the supernatural is one of the sources 
of power in men of primitive and intense faith. Crom- 
well was a practical mystic and never forgot to keep 
his powder dry, but he saw the hand of the Lord visibly 
at work for his cause on the winds and the tempest 
and that conviction added a fervour to his terrible 
sword. In his letter to Speaker Lenthall on the battle 
of Dunbar he tells how in marching from Mussel- 
burgh to Haddington the enemy fell upon "the rear- 



ON INDIFFERENCE OF NATURE 253 

forlorn of our horse" and "had like to have engaged 
our rear-brigade of horse with their whole army — had 
not the Lord by His Providence put a cloud over the 
Moon, thereby giving us opportunity to draw off those 
horse to the rest of our army." 

In the same way Elizabethan England witnessed 
God Himself in the tempest that scattered the Armada, 
and a hundred years later the people saw the same 
Divine sanction in the winds that brought William 
Prince of Orange to our shores and drove his pursuers 
away. "The weather had indeed served the Protestant 
cause so well," says Macaulay, "that some men of 
more piety than judgment fully believed the ordinary 
laws of nature to have been suspended for the preser- 
vation of the liberty and religion of England. Exactly 
a hundred years before, they said, the Armada, invin- 
cible by man, had been scattered by the wrath of God. 
Civil freedom and divine truth were again in jeopardy; 
and again the obedient elements had fought for the 
good cause. The wind had blown strong from the east 
while the Prince wished to sail down the Channel, 
had turned to the south when he wished to enter 
Torbay, had sunk to a calm during the disembarka- 
tion, and, as soon as the disembarkation was completed, 
had risen to a storm and had met the pursuers in the 
face." 

If we saw such a sequence of winds blowing for our 
cause we should, in spite of Macaulay, allow our piety 
to have the better of our judgment. Indeed, there 
have been those who in the absence of more solid 
evidence have accepted the Angels of Mons with as 



254 ON INDIFFERENCE OF NATURE 

touching and unquestioning a faith as they accepted 
the legend of the Army of Russians from Archangel. 
Perhaps it is not "piety" so much as anxiety that ac- 
counts for this credulity. In its more degraded form 
it is responsible for such phenomena as the revival of 
fortune telling and the emergence of the Prophet Bot- 
tomley. In its more reputable expression it springs 
from the conviction of the justice of our cause, of the 
dominion of the spiritual over the material and of the 
witness of that dominion in the operations of Nature. 




Then comes this vi^onderful harvest moon with its 
clear sky and its still air to light our enemies to their 
villainous work and to remind us that, however virtu- 
ous our cause, Nature is not concerned about us. She 
is indifferent whether we win or lose. She is not 
against us, but she is not for us. Sometimes she helps 
the enemy, and sometimes she helps us. She blew a 
snowstorm in the face of the Germans on the most 



ON INDIFFERENCE OF NATURE 255 

critical day of Verdun, and helped to defeat that great 
adventure. In August last she came out on the side 
of the enemy. She rained and blew ceaselessly, and 
disarranged our plans in Flanders, so that the attack 
on which so much depended was driven perilously late 
into the year. And even the brilliant moon and the 
cloudless nights that have been so disturbing to us in 
London speak the same language of Nature's impar- 
tiality. They serve the enemy here, but they are 
serving us far more just across the sea, where every 
bright day and moonlit night snatched from the mud 
and rain of the coming winter is of priceless value to 
our Army. That consideration should enable us to 
bear our affliction with fortitude as we crowd the 
"tubes" or listen to the roar of the guns from under 
the domestic table. 

But we must admit, on the evidence, that Nature 
does not care twopence who wins, and is as uncon- 
cerned about our affairs as we are about the affairs 
of a nest of ants that we tread on without knowing 
that we have trodden on it. She is beyond good and 
evil. She has no morals and is indifferent about 
justice and what men call right and wrong. She 
blasts the wise and leaves the foolish to flourish. 

Nature, with equal mind 
Sees all her sons at play; 
Sees man control the wind, 
The wind sweep man away; 
Allows the proudly riding and the found'ring barque. 

It is a chill, but a chastening thought. It leaves us 



256 ON INDIFFERENCE OF NATURE 

with a sense of loneliness, but it brings with it, also, 
a sense of power, the power of the unconquerable 
human spirit, self-dependent and self-reliant, reaching 
out to ideals beyond itself, beyond its highest hope of 
attainment, broken on the wheel of intractable things, 
but still stumbling forward by its half-lights in search 
of some Land of Promise that always skips just be- 
yond the horizon. 

Happily the moon is skipping beyond the horizon 
too. Frankly, we have seen enough of her face to 
last us for a long time. When she comes again 
let her clothe herself in good fat clouds and 
bring the winds in her train. We do not like to think 
of her as a mere flunkey of the Kaiser and the torch- 
bearer of his assassins. 





IF JEREMY CAME BACK 

It is the agreeable illusion of the theatre that life is 
a rounded tale. We pay our money at the box, go 
in, see the story begin, progress and end, sadly or 
cheerfully, and come away with the discords resolved, 
virtue exalted and villainy abased, and the tangled 
skein of things neatly unravelled. And so home, 
content. But on the stage of life there is none of 
this satisfying completeness and finish. We enter in 
the midst of a very ancient drama, spend our years 
in trying to pick up the threads and purport of the 
action, and go as inopportunely as we came. The 
curtain does not descend punctually upon an ex- 
hausted plot and an accomplished purpose. It de- 
scends upon a thrilling but unfinished tale. You 
have got, perhaps, into the most breathless part of 
the action, seized at last the clue that will assuredly 
explain the mystery, when suddenly and irrationally 
the light fails, and for you the theatre is dark for 
ever. Your emotions have been stirred, your curiosity 
awakened, your sympathies aroused in vain. Even 
the episode you have been permitted to witness is 
left with ragged ends and unfinished judgments. 
257 



258 IF JEREMY CAME BACK 

How did it proceed and how did it end, and what 
was the sequel? Was virtue or villainy triumphant? 
Who was the real hero? Were your sympathies on 
the right side or the wrong? And, more personally, 
what of those shoots of life you have thrown out to 
the challenge of the future? Did they wilt or flourish, 
and what was their fortune? These are among the 
thousand questions to which we should like an answer, 
and there is nothing unreasonable in thinking that 
we may have an answer. 

It would be enough to satisfy the curiosity of most 
of us to have the privilege which Jeremy Bentham 
confessed that he would like to enjoy. That amiable 
and industrious philosopher, having spent a blameless 
life in the development of his comfortable gospel of 
the "greatest good of the greatest number," enter- 
tained the pleasant fancy of returning to the scene 
of his labours once in every hundred years to see 
humanity marching triumphantly to the heavenly 
city of Utilitarianism, along the straight and smooth 
turnpike road that he had fashioned for its ease and 
direction. He had the touching confidence of the 
idealist that humanity only had to be shown the way 
out of the wilderness to plunge into it with joyous 
shouts, and hurry along it with eager enthusiasm. 
And since he had shown the way all would hence- 
forth be well. It is this confidence which makes the 
idealist an object of pity to the cynic. For the cynic 
is often only the idealist turned sour. He is the 
idealist disillusioned by loss of faith, not in his ideals, 
but in humanity. 



IF JEREMY CAME BACK 259 

This is about the time when Jeremy might be 
expected back on his first centennial visit to see how 
we have got along the road to human perfectibility. 
I can imagine him, poised in the unapparent, looking 
with round-eyed astonishment upon the answer which 
a century of time has given, to his anticipations. 
This, the New Jerusalem of his confident vision? 
This shambles the harvest of a hundred years of 
progress? And the cynic beside him, tapping his 
ghostly snuff-box, observes dryly, "They don't seem 
to have got very far on the way, friend Jeremy; 
not very far on the way." I can conceive the philos- 
opher returning sadly to the Elysian fields, wondering 
whether, after all, these visits are worth while. If 
this is the achievement of a hundred years' enjoyment 
of the philosophy of Utilitarianism, what unthinkable 
revelation may await him on his next visit? Perhaps 
. . . yes, perhaps, it will be better to stay away. 

But all the answers of time will not be so dis- 
quieting. It is probable, for example, that Benjamin 
Franklin will enjoy his visit immensely. He will 
find much to delight his curious and adventurous 
mind. I see him watching the flying machines as 
joyously as a child and as fondly as a parent. For 
among his multitudinous activities he experimented 
with balloons and suffered the gibes of the foolish. 
Why, asked his critic, did he waste his time over 
these childish things? What, in the name of heaven, 
was the use of balloons? And Benjamin made the 
immortal reply, "What is the use of a newborn 
baby?" If he is among the presences who watch 



26o IF JEREMY CAME BACK 

the events of to-day he will be almost as astonished 
as his critics to see the dimensions his "newborn 
baby" has grown to. He will be astonished at other 
things. He will recall the day when, in his fine 
flowered-silk garment, he entered, as the delegate of 
the insurgent farmers of New England, the recep- 
tion of the great, — was it not in Downing Street? — 
and was spat upon by the noble lords, to whose dim 
vision the future of the newborn baby across the 
Atlantic was undecipherable. He will recall how 
he put his outraged garment away, never to wear 
it again until he had signed the Declaration of In- 
dependence. And now, what miracle is this? Eng- 
land and America reconciled at last. England, no 
less than France, straining her eyes across the 
Atlantic for the relief that is hastening to her help 
in the extremest peril of her history from the giant 
by whose unquiet cradle he played his part a century 
and a half ago. . . . Well, no one will rejoice more 
at the reconciliation or watch the tide of relief stream- 
ing across the ocean with more good will than Ben- 
jamin, who deplored the breach with England as 
much as anybody. But the noble lords who spat on 
him. . . . 

And I can see Napoleon, with his unpleasant 
familiarity, pinching the spiritual ears of the French 
scientists of his day and saying, "How now, gentle- 
men? What do you say to the steamboat now?" 
Poor wretches, how humiliated they will be. For 
when Napoleon asked the Academic des Sciences to 
report as to the possibilities of the newly invented 



IF JEREMY CAME BACK 261 

steamboat, their verdict was, "Idee folle, erreur 
grossiere absurdite." They saw in it only a foolish 
toy, and not a newborn baby destined to be the 
giant who is performing such prodigies on the seas 
of the world to-day. 

But it is not the scientists who will need to hang 
their heads before the revelations that await them. 
They will look on with the complacency of those who 
see the mighty harvest of their sowing. Perhaps 
among the presences who surround them they may 
descry a bulky man, with rolling gait, whom they 
knew in their day on earth as the intellectual auto- 
crat of his generation and who levelled the shafts 
of his wit at their foolish experiments. They will 
have lost the very human frailty of retaliation if 
they do not remind him of some of those shafts that, 
to the admiring circle which sat at his feet, seemed 
so well-directed and piercing. Perhaps they will 
read this to him: 

Some turn the wheel of electricity, some suspend rings 
to a loadstone and find that what they did yesterday they 
can do again to-day. Some register the changes of the wind, 
and die fully convinced that the wind is changeable. There 
are men yet more profound, who have heard that two colour- 
less liquors may produce a colour by union, and that two 
cold bodies will grow hot if they are mingled; they mingle 
them, and produce the eflFect expected, say it is strange, and 
mingle them again. 

Admirable old boy! What wit you had! We 
can still enjoy it even though time has turned it to 
foolishness and planted its barb in your own breast. 



262 IF JEREMY CAME BACK 

All your roaring, sir, will not take the barb out. 
All your genius for argument will not prevail against 
the witness you see of the mighty fruits of those 
little experiments that filled your Olympian mind 
with scorn. But you will have your compensations. 
Even you will be astonished at the place you fill in 
our thoughts so long after your queer figure and 
brown wig were last seen in Fleet Street. You will 
find that the very age in which you lived is remem- 
bered as the Age of Johnson, and that the thunders 
of your voice, transmitted by the faithful Bozzy, 
are among the immortal reverberations from the past. 
Yes, sir, in spite of the scientists, you will go back 
very well content with your visit. 

And it may be that the victory of the scientists 
will assuage the disappointment of Jeremy himself. 
It is possible that when, back once more in whatever 
region of heaven is reserved for philosophers, he 
begins to reflect on all he has seen, Jeremy will re- 
cover his spirits. This moral catastrophe of man, he 
will say, must be seen in relation to his astonishing 
intellectual victory. I forgot that stage in the 
journey to the heavenly city of Utilitarianism. This 
century that has passed has witnessed that stage. 
It has been a period of inconceivable triumph over 
matter. Man has discovered all the wonders of the 
earth and is dazzled and drunk with the conquest of 
things. His moral and social sense has not been able 
to keep pace with this breathless material develop- 
ment. He has lost his spiritual bearings in the midst 
of the gigantic machine that his genius has fashioned. 



IF JEREMY CAME BACK 263 

He has become the slave of his own creation, the 
victim of the monster of his invention, and this calam- 
ity into w^hich he has fallen is his blind effort to 
readjust his life to the new scheme of things that 
the machine has imposed on him. The great par- 
turition is upon him and he is shedding gouts of 
blood in his agony. But he will emerge from his 
pains. The material century is accomplished; the 
conquest of the machine is at hand, and with that 
conquest the moral sense of man will revive with 
a grandeur undreamed of in the past. The march 
is longer than I thought, but it will gain impetus 
and majesty from this immense overthrow. The 
road I built was only premature. Man was not ready 
to take it. But it is still there — a little grass-grown 
and neglected, but still beckoning him on to the 
earthly paradise. When he rises from his wrestle in 
the dark, his sight will clear and he will surely take 
it. . . . Yes, I think I shall go back after all. . . . 
Unteachable old optimist, murmurs the cynic at his 
side. 




ON SLEEP AND THOUGHT 



In the middle of last night I found myself suddenly 
and quite acutely awake. It is an unusual experience 
for me. I knew the disturbance had not come from 
without myself, but from within — from some low 
but persistent knocking at the remote door of con- 
sciousness. Who was the knocker? I ran over the 
possible visitors before opening the door just as one 
sometimes puzzles over the writing of an address 
before opening a letter. Ah, yes, the disquieting 
discovery I had made yesterday — that was the 
intruder. And, saying this, I opened the door and 
let the fellow in, to sit upon my pillow and lord it 
over me in the darkness. I had succeeded in sup- 
pressing him before I went to bed — burying him 
beneath talk about this and that, some variations of 
Rameau, a few of those Hungarian songs from 
Korbay's collection, so incomparable in their fierce 
energy and passion, and so on ; the mound nicely 
rounded off with Duruy's "History of France," and 
the headstone of sleep duly erected. Now, I thought, 
264 



ON SLEEP AND THOUGHT 265 

I shall hear nothing more of him until I face him 
squarely to-morrow. And here, up from the depths 
he had come and taken his seat upon the headstone 
itself. 

It is with sleep as with affairs. One cracked bell 
will shatter a whole ring; one scheming, predatory 
power will set the whole world in flames. And one 
disorderly imp of the mind will upset the whole 
comity of sleep. He will neither slumber forgetfully 
nor play with the others in dreams, turning the 
realities and solemnities of the day into a wild travesty 
of fun or agony, in which everything that is incredible 
seems as natural as sneezing, and you stand on your 
head on the cross of St. Paul's or walk up the Strand 
carrying your head under your arm without any 
sense of surprise or impropriety. Nor is he one of 
those obliging subjects of the mind who obey their 
orders like a sensible housedog, sleeping with one 
eye open and ready to bark, as it were, if anything 
goes wrong. You know that sort of decent fellow. 
You say to him overnight, "Now, remember, I have 
that train to catch in the morning, and I must be 
awake without fail at seven." Or it may be six, or 
four. And whatever the hour you name, sure enough 
the good dog barks in time. If he has a failing, it 
is barking too soon and leaving you to discuss the 
nice question whether you dare go to sleep again 
or whether you had better remain awake. In the 
midst of which you probably go to sleep again and 
miss your train. 

This control of the kingdom of sleep by the appar- 



266 ON SLEEP AND THOUGHT 

ently dormant consciousness can be carried far. A 
friend of mine tells me that he has even learned to 
put his dreams under the check of conscious or sub- 
conscious thought. He had one persistent dream 
which took the form of missing the train. Some- 
times his wife was on board, and he rushed on to 
the platform just in time to see the train in motion 
and her head out of the window with agony written 
on her face. Sometimes he was in the train and his 
wife just missed it. Sometimes they were both 
inside, but saw their luggage being brought up too 
late. Sometimes the luggage got in and they didn't. 
Always something went wrong. He determined to 
have that dream regularised. And so before going 
to bed he thought hard of catching the train. He 
saturated himself with the idea of catching the train. 
And the thing worked like a charm. He never misses 
a train now, nor his wife, nor his luggage. They all 
steam away on their dream journeys together without 
a hitch. So he tells me, and I believe him, for he is 
a truthful man. 

You and I, and I suppose everybody, have had 
evidence of this sub-conscious operation in sleep. That 
it is common enough is shown by the familiar saying, 
"I will sleep on it," I have gone to bed more than 
once with problems that have seemed insoluble, have 
fallen to sleep, and have wakened in the morning with 
the course so clear that I have wondered how I could 
have been in doubt. And Sir Edward Clarke in his 
reminiscences of the Bar tells how, after a night over 
his briefs he would go to bed with his way through the 



ON SLEEP AND THOUGHT 267 

tangle obscure and perplexing, and would wake from 
sleep with the path plain as a pike staff. The pheno- 
menon is doubtless due in some measure to rest. The 
mind clears in sleeping as muddy water clears in stand- 
ing. But this is not the whole explanation. Some 
process has taken place in the interval far down in the 
hinterlands of thought. You may observe this even 
in your waking hours. Lord Leverhulme, who I 
suppose has one of the biggest letter-bags in the 
country, once told me that his habit in dealing with his 
correspondence is to answer at once those letters he 
can reply to offhand, and to put aside those that 
need consideration. When he turns to the latter he 
finds the answers have fashioned themselves without 
any conscious act of thought. This experience is not 
uncommon, and as it occurs when the mind is at the 
maximum of activity it disposes of the idea that rest 
is the complete explanation. 

More goes on in us than we know. At this moment 
I am conscious of at least six strata of thought. I 
am attending to this writing, the shaping of the letters, 
the spelling of the words; I am thinking what I 
shall write; I am sensible that a thrush is singing 
outside, and that the sun is shining; this pervades 
my mind with the glow of the thought that in a few 
days I shall be in the beechwoods; through this 
happy glow the ugly imp who sat on my pillow last 
night forces himself on my attention ; down below 
there is the boom of the great misery of the world 
that goes on ceaselessly like the deep strum of the 
double bass in the orchestra. And out of sight and 



268 ON SLEEP AND THOUGHT 

consciousness there are, I suspect, deeper and more 
obscure functions shaping all sorts of things in the 
unfathomed caves of the mind. The results will 
come to the surface in due course, and I shall wonder 
where they came from. It is a mistake to suppose 
that we can only think of one thing at a time. The 
mind can keep as many balls circulating as Cinque- 
valli. It can keep some of them circulating without 
knowing that they even exist. 

But these profound functions of the mind that 
know no sleep, and yet do not disturb our sleep, are 
not to be confused with that imp of the pillow. He 
is a brawler of the day. He brings the noisy world 
of fact into the cloistered calm or the playground of 
sleep. He is known to all of us, but most of all to 
the criminal who has still got a conscience. Macbeth 
knew him — "Macbeth hath murdered sleep, the 
innocent sleep." Eugene Aram knew him: — 

And a mighty wind had swept the leaves 
And still the corpse was bare. 

I know him. . . . And that reminds me. It is time 
I went and had it out with my imp of the pillow in the 
daylight. 




ON MOWING 



I HAVE hung the scythe up in the barn and now I 
am going to sing its praises. And if you doubt my 
competence to sing on so noble a theme come with 
me into the orchard, smell the new mown hay, mark 
the swathes where they lie, and note the workmanship. 
Yes, I admit that over there by the damson trees and 
down by the fence there is a sort of unkempt, dis- 
hevelled appearance about the grass as though it had 
been stabbed and tortured by some insane animal armed 
with an axe. It is true. It has been stabbed and 
tortured by an insane animal. It was there that I 
began. It was there that I hacked and hewed, per- 
spired and suffered. It was there that I said things 
of which in my calmer moments I should disapprove. 
It was there that I served my apprenticeship to the 
269 



270 ON MOWING 

scythe. But let your eye scan gently that stricken 
pasture and pause here where the orchard slopes to 
the paddock. I do not care who looks at this bit. I 
am prepared to stand or fall by it. It speaks for itself. 
The signature of the master hand is here. It is my 
signature. 

And having written that signature I feel like the 
wounded soldier spoken of by the "Wayfarer" in the 
Nation. He was returning to England, and as he 
looked from the train upon the cheerful Kentish land- 
scape and saw the haymakers in the fields he said, "I 
feel as though I should like to cut grass all the rest of 
my life." I do not know whether it was the crafts- 
man in him that spoke. Perhaps it was only the beau- 
tiful sanity and peace of the scene, contrasted with the 
squalid nightmare he had left behind, that wrung the 
words from him. But they were words that anyone 
who has used a scythe would echo. I echo them. I 
feel that I could look forward joyfully to an eternity 
of sunny da5's and illimitable fields of waving grass and 
just go on mowing and mowing and mowing for ever. 
I am chilled by the thought that you can only play 
the barber to nature once, or at most twice a year. I 
look back over the summers of the past, and lament 
my wasted opportunities. What meadows I might have 
mown had I only known the joy of it. 

For mowing is the most delightful disguise that 
work can wear. When once you have got the trick of 
it, it goes with a rhythm that is intoxicating. The 
scythe, which looked so ungainly and unmanageable 



ON MOWING 271 

a tool, gradually changes its character. It becomes 
an instrument of infinite flexibility and delicacy. The 
lines that seemed so uncouth and clownish are discov- 
ered to be the refinement of time. What centuries 
of accumulated experience under the suns of what di- 
verse lands have gone to the perfecting of this most 
ancient tool of the fields, shaping the blade so cun- 
ningly, adjusting it to the handle at so artful an angle, 
disposing the nebs with such true relationship to the 
action of the body, so that, skilfully used, the instru- 
ment loses the sense of weight and seems to carry you 
forward by its own smooth, almost instinctive motion. 
It is like an extension of yourself, with a touch as fine 
as the brush of a butterfly's wing and a stroke as bold 
and resistless as the sweep of a cataract. It is no longer 
a clumsy, blundering, dead thing, but as obedient as 
your hand and as conscious as your touch. You seem 
to have developed a new member, far-reaching, with the 
edge of a scimitar, that will flick off a daisy or fell 
a forest of stalwart grasses. 

And as the intimacy grows you note how the action 
simplifies itself. The violent stabbings and discords 
are resolved into a harmony as serene as a pastoral 
symphony. You feel the rhythm taking shape, and 
as it develops the body becomes captive to its own 
task. You are no longer manipulating a tool. You 
and the tool have become magically one, fused in a 
common intelligence, so that you hardly know whether 
you swing the scythe or the scythe bears you forward 
on its own strong, swimming stroke. The mind, re- 



272 ON MOWING 

leased, stands aloof in a sort of delighted calm, rejoic- 
ing in a spectacle in which it has ceased to have a con- 
scious part, noting the bold swing of the body back- 
wards for the stroke (the blade lightly skimming the 
ground, as the oar gently flatters the water in its 
return), the delicate play of the wrist as the scythe 
comes into action, the "swish" that tells that the stroke 
is true and clean, the thrust from the waist upwards 
that carries it clear, the dip of the blade that leaves 
the swathe behind, the moderate, timely, exact move- 
ment of the feet preparatory to the next stroke, the law, 
musical hum of the .vibrating steel. A frog hops out 
in alarm at the sudden invasion of his secrecy among 
the deep grasses. You hope he won't get in the way 
of that terrible finger, but you are drunk with the 
rhythm of the scythe and are swept along on its im- 
perious current. You are no longer a man, but a 
motion. The frog must take his chance. Swish — 

swish — swish 

Not that the rhythm is unrelieved. It has its "ac- 
cidentals." You repeat a stroke that has not pleased 
you, with a curious sense of pleasure at the interrupted 
movement which has yet not changed the theme; you 
nip off a tuft here or there as the singer throws in a 
stray flourish to garland the measure; you trim round 
the trees with the pleasant feeling that you can make 
this big thing do a little thing so deftly; you pause 
to whet the blade with the hone. But all the time 
the song of the scythe goes on. It fills your mind and 
courses through your blood. Your pulse beats to the 



ON MOWING 273 

rhythmic swish — swish — swish, and to that measure 
you pass into a waking sleep in which the hum of bees 
and the song of lark and cuckoo seem to belong to a 
dream world through which you are floating, bound 
to a magic oar. 

The sun climbs the heavens above the eastward 
hills, goes regally overhead, and slopes to his setting 
beyond the plain. You mark the shadows shorten 
and lengthen as they steal round the trees. A thrush 
sings ceaselessly through the morning from a beech tree 
on the other side of the lane, falls silent during the 
heat of the afternoon and begins again as the shadows 
lengthen and a cool wind comes out of the west. Over- 
head the swifts are hawking in the high air for their 
evening meal. Presently they descend and chase each 
other over the orchard with the curious sound of an 
indrawn whistle that belongs to the symphony of late 
summer evenings. 

You are pleasantly conscious of these pleasant things 
as you swing to the measured beat of the scythe, and 
your thoughts play lightly with kindred fancies, snatches 
of old song, legends of long ago, Ruth in the fields of 
Boaz, and Horace on his Sabine farm, the sonorous 
imagery of Israel linking up the waving grasses with 
the life of man and the scythe with the reaper of a 
more august harvest. 

The plain darkens, and the last sounds of day fall 
on the ear, the distant bark of a dog, the lowing of 
cattle in the valley, the intimate gurglings of the thrush 



274 



ON MOWING 



settling for the night in the nest, the drone of a winged 
beetle blundering through the dusk, one final pure note 
of the white throat. There is still light for this last 
slope to the paddock. Swish — swish — swish. . . . 








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